Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

15. Jonathan Watts, “China Admits Toxic Spill Is Threat to City’s Water,” Guardian, November 24, 2005.

16. The spill and tap cutoff in 2005 were far from unique. In the next eleven months there were 130 other far less widely reported contamination cases on the river, according to Pan Yue (interview in Newsweek ).

17. The reporting window lasted four days, then the authorities became nervous and it was back to business as usual. The propaganda department ordered the domestic media to cease independent reporting of the scandal. Instead, they were told to reproduce the officially approved version of events distributed by the state-run Xinhua News Agency.

18. Most of the money has been spent near the Russian border to allay the pollution concerns of China’s neighbor. The results have been mixed. The tributaries are becoming worse as the main river improves, according to the environmental group Green Longjiang. Li’s official position is that the improvements can be observed along the entire waterway. Nonetheless, the river is still foul. Downstream from Harbin, the water quality remains a dismal four on a declining scale of five, which means it is fit only for irrigation and industry. But even this is better than the situation before the 2005 spill, when it was deemed so contaminated as to be of no use anywhere.

19. Several local journalists and officials sympathized with Heilongjiang’s government, saying they had to lie because Jilin, the neighboring province, had lied first and the Heilongjiang officials could not contradict them. In real terms, little changed. The maximum penalty for the polluter was just 1 million yuan, an insignificant amount for China National Petroleum Corporation. Most of the officials involved escaped by offering an apology.

20. Li told me that, during the preceding twelve months, 20,000 law-enforcement officials had inspected 8,000 factories and ordered the closure of 250. Heilongjiang had punished seven local authorities who failed to enforce pollution regulations. Their penalty was a denial of all development plans for six months.

21. According to Green Longjiang.

22. He boasted that his office provides information to more than eighty front-page or prime-time TV news exposés every year, most of them naming and shaming the violators of environmental regulations.

23. Newspapers and television stations played a key role in nurturing green movements in the U.S., Europe, and Japan in the 1970s. But the signs of this happening in China are mixed. Many journalism schools now teach principles that would be more recognizable to their counterparts in Western nations than to their predecessors thirty years ago. Unlike in the past, the first duty of a reporter is to the public rather than the party. Pioneering media such as the Nanfang Daily newspaper group and Caijing magazine, and individual journalists such as Cheng Yizhong, Li Datong, Wang Keqin, Chen Guidi, and Wu Chuntao are pushing back the boundaries of censorship, particularly on environmental issues. And, of course, the Internet has provided a new realm for public discourse and made it far harder for the authorities to cover up scandals.

24. In 2002, there were fewer than fifty registered green NGOs in the country. By 2007, there were almost 3,000 (Jonathan Watts, “The Man Making the World’s Worst Polluter Clean Up Its Act,” Observer, July 8, 2007).

25. Jonathan Watts, “Local Governments Keep Chinese Public in the Dark about Pollution,” Guardian, September 4, 2009.

26. The 2003 Practical Manual for Party Propaganda Work, which includes a foreword by Hu Jintao, notes: “News reporting should hold to the positive-ness principle by handling properly the balance of praise and exposing problems. In any case, the reader should be left with feelings of encouragement, trust, courage and hope” (p. 82, trans. China Digital Times ).

27. Ma Jun, China’s Water Crisis (Eastbridge, 2004), p. 114.

28. The Taoist-inspired necromantic belief in the importance of balancing strong natural forces, particularly in one’s home.

29. The three provinces together cover 793,000 square kilometers. Other definitions of Manchuria and Dongbei (northeast) include parts of Inner Mongolia.

30. He Qiutao (Qing dynasty inspector), “Northern Defense Notes” (1858), cited in Ma, China’s Water Crisis, p. 113.

31. By the end of the Second World War, Japan had removed an estimated 100 million or more cubic feet of lumber from the northeast (Qu Geping and Li Jinchang, Population and the Environment in China [Lynne Rienner, 1994]). Many of the darkest deeds in Japan’s militaristic past were perpetrated in this part of the world, which was also a base of chemical and biological weapons experiments on live prisoners.

32. Ma, China’s Water Crisis, p. 114.

33. Interview with Wang Song, former CITES representative for China.

34. Quoted in Ma, China’s Water Crisis, p. 115.

35. The whodunnit mystery surrounding the death of China’s forests is politically charged. An alternative view, which paints the Communist Party in a far more positive light, is put forward by Qu and Li in Population and the Environment in China. They say most deforestation occurred in the centuries before 1949 as a result of population growth, backward agricultural production, feudal leaders’ large-scale construction projects (such as the Great Wall and E’fang Palace), warfare, and the absence of afforestation programs. The latter “path of neglect” was reversed, they say, after the communists took power in 1949, when the government called people to arms with the slogan “Plant trees to cover the country.” This quickened steps to reforest barren mountainsides and valleys. But even these defenders of government policy acknowledge the deficit in forested areas continued to rise because of the demand for arable land and timber products. Two huge clearances followed. First, for the dam building and steel smelting of the Great Leap Forward, then during the Cultural Revolution, when the educated students were sent to reclaim land from the wilderness. Over 2,200 years, Qu and Li estimate forest cover in China declined from 42.9 percent to 12 percent (p. 57).

36. The most up-to-date forestry inventory is ten years old; the standing volume of the province’s forests is estimated at 1.5 billion square meters, which is 15.4 percent of the total in China (Fredrik Samuelsson, “The Potential for Quality Production in Birch Stands in North-Eastern China Using Different Precommercial Thinning Strategies,” MSc thesis, Southern Swedish Forest Research Center, June 2006). Ma estimated that the forests of the northeast, including Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning, provided a third of China’s wood around the turn of the century. Even with the selective cutting of secondary forest that followed, Heilongjiang continued to have the largest annual logging volume in China (Ma, China’s Water Crisis, p. 116).

37. The figurehead for the conversion was Ma Yongshun, a model worker in the timber industry from the first generation of lumberjacks. In the era before chain saws, he was praised by Mao for a technique that enabled a single person to fell six trees in a day. Ma claimed to have chopped down 36,500 trees before realizing late in his career that his technique was too successful. The forests were disappearing. Alarmed at the consequences of his success, Ma laid down his ax and took up a trowel for planting seedlings. He felt he owed a debt to the mountains. Every year on March 12, national tree-planting day, he would make a very public repayment (Ma, China’s Water Crisis, p. 116.).

38. Formally known as the “Three-North Shelterbelt,” the 50-billion-yuan ($7 billion) project is designed to protect cities and cropland from floods and the desert. In Heilongjiang, floods are the main concern. This is particularly true since 1998, when the Songhua River system suffered its worst flood in 2,000 years. Desperate to prevent the rising waters from deluging the strategic oil fields of Daqing, the authorities blasted embankments protecting the agricultural plains. The economic damage was estimated at 30 billion yuan. When Premier Zhu Rongji visited the disaster site, he pledged to preserve the forests as a natural barrier against flooding. The eventual aim of the project is to cover 406.9 million hectares or 42 percent of China’s landmass with trees (John MacKinnon and Wang Haibin, The Green Gold of China [EU-China Biodiversity Programme, 2008], p. 280).