Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

23. They were chosen with three criteria in mind: shan, san, dong (in mountains, dispersed, in caves). As often as not, this meant locations where they would be most inefficient and cause maximum damage to pristine landscapes. With war considered imminent, they were planned hurriedly and rushed into operation. Mao was under no illusions about the bespoiling character of the Third Front campaign. It was, as he said in a memorably earthy 1964 speech, the arse-end of a three-pronged war effort: “Agriculture is one fist, and national defense is another fist. To make the fists strong, the rear end must be seated securely. The rear end is basic industry.” Given this analogy, it is no surprise that many of the sites of “Third Front” factories resemble toilets.

24. Which suggests some creative head-counting, given the government-imposed limit of twenty animals per person.

25. The impact of black carbon and brown clouds on the Himalayas is a source of increasing concern (Randeep Ramesh and Suzanne Goldenberg, “Soot Clouds Pose Threat to Himalayan Glaciers,” Observer, October 4, 2009).

26. In Xinjiang, the pattern of warming and drying is particularly complex. While overall ice cover has declined dramatically, a few glaciers have continued to expand. Much of western China appears to be getting moister. Traditional temperature patterns may be inverting. Winters are warming faster than summers. While the highest, coldest places are melting, the lowest, hottest areas appear to be cooling and growing wetter. Deserts are getting more rain. Some scientists in Xinjiang believe the deserts may be an ally in the battle against climate change. They found that the alkaline ground gulps more carbon dioxide at night than temperate forests. Similar results in the U.S. led some to believe that deserts might soak up half the amount of carbon currently emitted by the burning of fossil fuels. Similar findings have come from studies in Nevada’s Mojave Desert, where the sand soaks up about the same amount of CO 2per square meter as in some temperate forests. If confirmed, this would be good news because almost a third of the earth’s land surface is desert (Richard Stone, “Have Desert Researchers Discovered a Hidden Loop in the Carbon Cycle?” Science, June 13, 2008, p. 1409).

27. According to the World Resources Institute’s history of CO 2emissions since 1900, China is third behind the U.S. and Russia. http://www.guard-ian.co.uk/environment/datablog/2009/sep/02/co2-emissions-historical. Earlier starting dates also put China behind the UK and other developed nations.

28. See ch. 11, n. 3 (Elvin, “The Environmental Legacy of Imperial China,” in Edmonds [ed.], Managing the Chinese Environment ).

29. Xie Yan of the Wildlife Conservation Society is extremely concerned about the impact of global warming on orchids and other species because rare species are concentrated in such small bands of land that they cannot easily migrate for survival. “I think there will be big problems caused by global warming. Many species are very sensitive to temperature, such as amphibians. They are narrowly distributed. If the existing nature reserve is not suitable anymore, they could go extinct. Some plants only have 100 or so in some locations. Many are critically endangered. Orchids are extremely threatened” (interview with author).

30. Nomads were blamed by Han settlers for degrading land they and their ancestors had lived on sustainably for centuries. Tibetans, Mongolians, and Uighurs were targets of resettlement programs. Climate change was only part of the reason.

31. Since the completion of a 4,200-kilometer pipeline from the Lunnan field in the Tarim basin to Shanghai in 2004, Xinjiang has been China’s biggest supplier of natural gas. Several other vast pipelines have been built or are under construction that will link central Asia’s oil and gas fields with the factories and cities on China’s eastern seaboard. Engineers have built roads to carry oil through the Taklimakan, a desert where the dunes encroach so rapidly that guards have to be posted every 5 kilometers to maintain the 400-kilometer rose-willow defense line against the sands.

32. More ambitious still, a new Silk Road is under construction. Asia Highway One, as the modern version is prosaically called, will link Urumqi with Istanbul, passing through the resource-rich nations of Iran, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Political ties are being strengthened through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which groups China, Russia, and central Asian states that together control a quarter of the world’s oil supplies.

33. The share value passed $1 trillion soon after the firm listed in 2007.

34. Introduction to Urumqi, Frommer’s (www.frommers.com).

35. During holiday peaks, their sprinklers and snow machines use enough water every day to fill more than twenty Olympic swimming pools. (Josh Chin and Zachary Slobig, “Xinjiang’s Melting Glaciers,” China Dialogue, March 20, 2008).

36. At U-Cang, in the north of the city, work is under way on an “ecological park” aimed at nurturing a more sustainable lifestyle among residents. All municipal flowerbeds, lawns, and hedgerows are doused with treated waste-water. The skies are also clearer now that the huge coal-fired power plants have been ordered to wash their coal before burning it. Our driver Wu told us that the smoke from their chimneys has changed from black to white. See also Jonathan Watts, “China Plans 59 Reservoirs to Collect Meltwater from Its Shrinking Glaciers,” Guardian, March 2, 2009.

37. The state media continues to give prominent coverage to her speeches. Her critics are marginalized. The best known of them is Dai Qing, who accuses Qian of irresponsibility for saying, “The coming generations are bound to have greater intelligence than we do? Let’s trust their ability to solve their problems” (Dai Qing, Yangtze! Yangtze! [Probe International, 1993]).

38. The overseas Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer often linked environmental stress to ethnic tension as in this interview comment: “Han Chinese are brought in to water down our population … When the Chinese Communist Party first occupied us in 1949, only 2 per cent of the population was Han Chinese. Now, they number 60 per cent. There is also widespread environmental damage. Three lakes have dried up, our natural resources are exploited, and thus, the environment is disturbed too. In the early days Uighurs were able to work in agriculture and earn a living. Now, they no longer have this opportunity because so many Han Chinese have arrived. People resist such suppression” (Florian Godovits, “China’s Female ‘Public Enemy Number One’ on the State of China’s Muslim Uighurs,” Epoch Times, October 29, 2007).

39. On July 5, 2009, decapitations, knifings, and beatings left 197 dead and 1,721 injured, according to government figures. The vast majority of the victims were Han. Uighur exile groups claim the toll is higher and includes more minority victims, but foreign reporters who were given relatively free access to Urumqi were unable to find evidence that large numbers of Uighurs were killed.

40. She cited the specific case of the Miyun Reservoir near Beijing, which had been designed for an annual runoff of 1.4 billion cubic meters of water, but had actually received just 500 million cubic meters.

41. According to government figures, Xinjiang now has 1.4 million hectares of farmland, accounting for 3.3 percent of the national total. Although much of it is used for cotton, the area is also famous for melons and other fruit.

42. Plans for expansion concentrated primarily on San San, Turpan, and Harmi (“Expert Says Xinjiang Is the Land of Opportunity for Coal Liquification Projects,” Caijing, September 22, 2009).