Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

15. The ministry of forestry has set a target of enough new artificial poplar plantations by 2015 to produce 143 million cubic meters of timber every year—almost equal to the entire amount that China currently imports.

16. This felt horribly familiar. It reminded me of Mao-era architecture in Beijing, all of which was initially constructed according to fifty standard Soviet blueprints. Even this was considered too diverse during the ultraegalitarian Cultural Revolution, when everything was built to one of just four designs. The rural landscape was following the utilitarian path of the postrevolution cityscape (Jasper Becker, City of Heavenly Tranquility: Beijing in the History of China [Penguin, 2008], p. 280).

17. Interview with Jiang Gaoming.

18. Interview with Jiang Gaoming. We met in late 2008, soon after the government admitted that melamine, illegally added to milk, had killed at least six infants and left a further 860 babies hospitalized.

19. By one estimate, 2.7 billion tons of livestock manure are produced throughout China every year, 3.4 times the amount of industrial solid waste. But in most places less than a tenth of the manure is returned to the land (Wu Weixiang, Department of Environment Engineering at Zhejiang University, quoted in “A New Livestock Revolution,” China Daily, December 19, 2006).

20. The World Bank is investing heavily in the project to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce indoor air pollution, and improve sanitary conditions.

21. But there is the problem of trust. In China today, few consumers believe “organic” labels are anything but a marketing gimmick. Their skepticism is understandable. Countless food-safety scandals have been caused by corruption, counterfeiting, and reckless shortcuts aimed at boosting profits. All too often a stamp of approval by the authorities merely shows that the regulatory officials have been paid a big enough bribe. Other checks and balances are missing. Journalists are frequently paid off with “taxi money” bribes. There are no independent courts. Consumer organizations are weak or nonexistent. Nothing is allowed to impinge upon the authority of the party. So if the party approves something, there is no comeback. Many commentators see this resulting “crisis of trust” as one of China’s biggest problems.

22. From a book of twenty-four stories about filial piety compiled by Guo Jujing during the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368).

23. Cynics who thought Lei sounded too good to be true were almost certainly correct. Conveniently, however, the selected icon had died a year before the campaign started when a clumsy army colleague backed a truck into an electricity pole that flattened the soon-to-be national treasure. The propaganda authorities had, of course, already recorded his deeds and acquired a “diary” of his politically perfect thoughts. In addition to his dung donation, Lei’s altruism reportedly extended to scrubbing public toilets in his spare time, darning the socks of poor farmers, and giving away his meager savings to the needy.

24. She was supported both physically and financially by the villagers, including Professor Jiang. Some locals believed she was a shaman who could cure the sick by touching their heads.

25. Chinese anecdotal history contains numerous tales of people turning to cannibalism during famines throughout the ages, most recently after the Great Leap Forward.

26. In the English-speaking world, Lester Brown and Vaclav Smil are, on one side, warning that falling water tables and overuse of the land are threatening the nation’s ability to feed itself. On the other is Peter Lindert, professor of economics and director of the Agricultural History Center at the University of California, Davis, who suggests the depth of topsoil is relatively unchanged in China and the quality may even have improved. See Brown, The Earth Policy Reader (Norton, 2002); Smil, Global Catastrophes and Trends ; Lindert, Shifting Ground: The Changing Agricultural Soils of China and Indonesia (MIT Press, 2000).

27. Researchers from the government’s Institute of Soil Science in Nanjing have found that soils in fields converted to growing vegetables are becoming dramatically more acid, with average pH falling from 6.3 to 5.4 in ten years. Meanwhile nitrates are at four times previous levels, and phosphate levels are up tenfold ( Environmental Geochemistry and Health 26, pp. 97, 119). The changes in soil chemistry have been accompanied by an equally dramatic decline in soil bacteria and an epidemic of fungus. The deterioration is worst when the crops are grown under plastic (Fred Pearce, “China’s Changing Farms Damaging Soil and Water,” New Scientist, September 18, 2004).

28. Interview with Qian Zhengying, former minister of water conservancy and power.

29. More use of fertilizers means more nitrous oxide emissions, which are 200 times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide (Smil, Global Catastrophes and Trends, p. 225). The rising demand for rice means more methane emissions from paddies.

30. “The Limits of a Green Revolution?” BBC News, March 29, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6496585.stm.

31. Dale Allen Pfeiffer, “Eating Fossil Fuels,” October 3, 2003, www.fromthe wilderness.com.

32. In 2001, there were six covering a combined area of less than 3,000 square kilometers. Five years later there were more than forty spanning more than 15,000 square kilometers. (Figures based on research by Zhou Mingjiang, former head of the Institute of Oceanology.)

33. Jin Xiangcan, vice director of China Society of Environmental Sciences, said the affected area was about 135 square kilometers in the 1970s, but due to the rapid development of the economy and society, it increased to 8,700 square kilometers by 2009 (“Areas of Lakes Affected by Eutrophication in China Increases 60 Times in 40 Years,” Xinhua, November 6, 2009; http://news.xinhuanet.com/politics/2009-11/05/content_12391302.htm).

34. Wastewater treatment expenditure from National Statistical Yearbook 2006. In June 2007, the provincial Maritime Fisheries Bureau confirmed severe pollution off the coast of Shandong at Laizhou Bay, Jiaozhou Bay, the southern Bohai Gulf, and the mouth of the Yellow River. The contaminants were inorganic nitrates, lime phosphates, and oil (“Dark Water: Coastal China on the Brink [I],” Southern Metropolis Daily, April 8, 2008).

35. Shi Jiangtao, “Bohai Sea Will Be Dead in 10 Years,” South China Morning Post, October 19, 2006.

36. At Yanwei in Jiangsu, the stench from polluted water was so bad in 2007 that children had to be sent home from their school. In the far south tourist resort of Silver Beach in Guanxi Province, Xinhua reported the runoff from a shellfish processing plant turned the sea into a stinking red patch of effluent (Liang Siqi, “World’s Best Beach Polluted, Stench from Discharge Pipe Unbearable,” Xinhua, February 15, 2007 [in Chinese]).

37. In 2006, in the heavily industrialized southeastern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, almost 8.3 billion tons of sewage were discharged into the ocean without treatment, a 60 percent increase from 2001. More than 80 percent of the East China Sea, one of the world’s largest fisheries, was graded at the second highest level of pollution or worse in 2006, up from 53 percent in 2000.

The state news agency reports that the seabed is suffering desertification because of a discharge of sewage and pollutants (Xinhua, “China’s Seabed Undergoing Desertification Caused by Pollution,” December 15, 2006), although the scale of such phenomena is difficult to gauge. Xinhua, once unreliable because it was merely a mouthpiece for the Communist Party, is now prone to exaggerating environment scares because it is now freer in this area to stir up a circulation-boosting storm. Two scholars told me the damage caused by industrial pollution and overfishing on the seabed is overstated.