Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

39. This resolution was passed in 1981 (Liang Chao, “China Now Tops in Most ‘Human-Planted’ Trees on Earth,” China Daily, March 12, 2004). Many people did not fulfill their quota, and farmers were later given financial incentives to plant saplings.

40. Before this, the party organized numerous, but intermittent, mass tree-planting drives (Qu and Li, Population and the Environment in China, p. 37).

41. And perhaps it has. The country is now planting more trees than the rest of the world combined. In Heilongjiang, Provincial Forestry Department figures suggest tree cover has risen to 43.6 percent. Academics in Harbin put the figure at 46 percent.

42. The State Forestry Administration claims forest cover is increasing by 66 million hectares every year (Jonathan Watts, “China Fights to Hold Back Sands,” Guardian, February 28, 2006).

43. Some estimate that up to two-thirds of trees die before reaching maturity because farmers have a financial incentive to plant saplings quickly rather than considering local conditions, the need for diversity, and the effort required to nurture them. Chinese forestry scientists, however, told me the survival rate is about 70 percent.

44. According to China’s Bureau of Statistics, “forest coverage rate” refers to the ratio of area of afforested land to total land area. This indicator shows the forest resources and afforestation progress of a country or a region. In addition to afforested land, the area of bush forest, the area of woodland inside farmland, and the area of trees planted adjacent to farmhouses and along roads, rivers, and fields should also be included in the area of afforested land in the calculation of the forest coverage rate.

45. Qu and Li, Population and the Environment in China, p. 57.

46. Those replanted at the behest of paper and furniture manufacturers often comprise only one or two types of fast-growing tree. Eucalyptus trees dominate the south, poplars the center, and larch and birch the northwest.

47. In 2008, the huge extent of the winter storm damage exposed the quality problem of China’s forestation effort. Worst hit were the young and semimature trees which cover about 70 percent of reforested areas. Owing to poor seedling quality and inadequate care, the trees had grown more slowly and were thus weaker and less resilient than if better standards had been maintained. The extensive damage suffered by bamboo forests also illustrates the risks associated with monoculture plantations, since mixed forests could have been expected to withstand better the severity of snow and ice damage. In 2002, for example, larch trees in Heilongjiang suffered such an infestation of pine caterpillars that the Qiqihar Railway Bureau had to halt services while the tracks were cleaned of a 5-centimeter layer of slippery mashed larvae, as recorded by Song Xinzhou of GreenBeijing.net. Song also notes: “Artificial forests are unable to resist natural pests, have poor water retention qualities, do not help prevent soil erosion, and do not support much undergrowth, which leads to more frequent forest fires. Single-species forests, grown to increase coverage alone, not only fail to solve environmental problems, but also create new crises of their own” (Song Xinzhou, “Greening China: Successes and Failures,” China Dialogue, August 2, 2007).

48. Wang’s meetings with Sir Peter Scott, then head of the World Wildlife Fund, led to the creation of a joint project for giant panda conservation at Wolong (see Ch. 4). The panda became the symbol of the organization’s worldwide conservation in 1981, the same year that China signed up to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, more commonly known as CITES. Wang was the country’s representative for most convention negotiations in the years that followed, and he has pressed as hard as anyone in China for the protection of biodiversity.

49. Backed by the environment ministry and tourist agency, this experiment aims to balance protection and development.

50. At this early stage, however, it looks shaky. Local officials appear far more interested in the potential for development than the responsibility of conservation.

51. Tony Whitten, senior biodiversity specialist for the East Asia and Pacific Region at the World Bank, describes the region’s forests as “eerily quiet” after insidious degradation and attrition. He says this is common nationwide and across much of Southeast Asia.

52. As recently as the 1960s, there were more than 200 of these giant beasts in Heilongjiang and Jilin and smaller tigers in more than half the provinces in China. Now there are thought to be only twenty left in the wild (figures provided by the Wildlife Conservation Society). The captive population has increased. Harbin has a giant tiger “conservation” park but, like its counterpart in Xiongsen, this is actually more accurately described as a farm or circus that aims mainly to generate income from tourism and sales of parts for traditional Chinese medicine. Both are under the jurisdiction of the state forestry agency. A healthier wild population of Amur tigers exists in the better-protected forests of Siberia.

53. Each autumn, when the frogs migrate downstream from the mountains, locals trap them with plastic bags snagged on the surface of streams. Others are killed by poisoning or indiscriminate electric fishing. Such tactics are illegal but common. I have seen “fishermen” with batteries strapped to their backs dipping electric rods into ponds and brooks, killing everything that passes between them. Along with pollution and habitat loss, this explains why the population of wild salmon in Heilongjiang has fallen by more than 90 percent (Shapiro, Mao’s War Against Nature, p. 168).

54. Researchers calculated the benefits of the Changbaishan Nature Reserve were worth 9.3 billion yuan, taking into account its ability to absorb carbon, produce oxygen, conserve water, act as a barrier to wind and desertification, regulate climate, prevent soil erosion, ease the risk of flooding, and assist in pest management by providing a home to birds that eat insects. The cost of building a reservoir with the same water capacity as the reserve has been estimated at 2.8 billion yuan. The Jilin Environmental Protection Research Institute also calculated that a single hectare of forested land conserves 3,000 square meters more water than the same area of non-forested land (Qu and Li, Population and the Environment in China, pp. 55–56).

55. China Youth Daily, December 31, 2008.

56. One study estimated that 67 percent of the forest was Dahurian larch ( Larix gmelinii ), while 25 percent was white birch ( Betula platyphylla ) (Samuels-son, “The Potential for Quality Production in Birch Stands in North-Eastern China,” p. 10).

57. China produces 60 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks every year at the cost of 25 million trees (Ma, China’s Water Crisis, p. 117).

58. Better known outside China by its Russian name, the Amur.

59. In addition to the logging example cited here, a major cross-border environmental problem is that of water diversion. The Hailaer River (known downstream as Ergun in Chinese and Argun in Russian) is being diverted to replenish the parched Dalai Lake and ease the problems of salination and eutrophication in Inner Mongolia. That means less water in Russia and a loss of habitat for many rare birds in the Daurian wetlands (data from Pacific Environment, www.pacificenvironment.org, and International Rivers, www.internationalrivers.org).

60. From the late 1990s to the early twenty-first century, China’s share of exports of round timber from the Russian Far East rose from 10 percent to about 50 percent. About 70 percent is felled illegally. The World Wide Fund for Nature, Friends of Nature, Traffic, Greenpeace, and Pacific Environment have all issued reports showing that the surge in illegal logging in southern Siberia’s taiga forests has been predominantly driven by demand from China.