Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

I was to look more closely at the impact of climate change in Xinjiang (see chapter 12), but it was near the railway to Tibet that I first saw the problem up close. We took our 4 × 4 vehicle off the road to see one of the biggest glaciers on the route, the wall of ice wedged between two peaks near Dongdatan. It was a hard drive across broken rock and streams, then a short climb to the foot of the glacier. The bright sun had me sweating. The mountain also seemed to be perspiring. The heat had cut deep rivulets into the ice. As we drew closer, each crease in the ice proved to be a torrent of gushing water, some of which had probably been locked solid for hundreds, possibly thousands, of years.

There were signs of landslides too, both on the slopes and back on the road, where subsidence caused by melting foundations had brought down bridges and cracked and potted several stretches of the road. Global warming was not the only cause. Near Kunlun Pass was a monument marking the huge earthquake that struck the area in 2001. The temblor, which measured 8.1 on the Richter scale, ripped a 7,000-meter crack through the earth, part of which was still clearly visible.

To minimize the risk of a disaster, rail planners had placed seismic monitoring systems at several points along the tracks that were designed to give advance warning about earth and temperature movements. This railway was going to be even harder to maintain than it had been to build.

The farther we progressed alongside the track, the more obvious was the damage to the roof of the world. It was leaking. Overgrazing had stripped off its thin grassy cover, and global warming had burned through its liquid insulation. The road and the railway accelerated these trends by lifting temperatures and heaping man-made stress onto the already fragile surface vegetation. Between the rail and the road were puddles and pools of melted ice. Other areas were turning into mountain desert. On either side of the track, herds of cows and sheep munched on blotchy patches of grassland near man-made barriers erected to keep the encroaching sand dunes at bay. The loss of grass and topsoil was not just a threat to the beauty of the plateau and the grazing of the cattle; it also accelerated the speed at which the permafrost melted and raised the risk that billions of tons of methane hydrates contained inside the ice would be released into the atmosphere. 26Methane’s greenhouse gas effect is fifty times that of carbon dioxide.

Settlement and modernization had also brought the problem of nondegradable rubbish. Behind each cluster of buildings on the route, such as the small village-garrison of Wudaoliao, was a stinking pile of rotting bags, empty tins, plastic bottles, and gas cans. When I asked my driver how the refuse was disposed of, he laughed. “We leave that job to the wind and the rain and the dogs.”

The rubbish was piling up elsewhere in the mountains along with improved transport links. The problem was notorious at Mount Everest, which is known locally as Chomolungma. Ahead of the Olympics, builders laid a tarmac road to within 20 kilometers of base camp for the torch relay leg up to the world’s highest mountain. The greatest of man’s expeditions in the 1950s was now just a car trip away and was starting to suffer the same problems of any other crowded sightseeing spot. Since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay first scaled the mountain on May 29, 1953, there had been more than 4,000 ascents and countless other visitors to the base camps in China and Nepal. Both countries are struggling to deal with the empty beer cans, discarded oxygen bottles, and other refuse left behind. With climate change also posing a threat in the form of meltwater floods, in 2005 Sir Edmund called for Everest to be added to the UN list of endangered heritage sites.

But, on the Chinese side of the mountain at least, economic development took priority. That was clear in the treatment of wildlife. The plateau is home to thousands of species of plants and more than 500 species of birds. The railway runs through three nature reserves: Hoh Xil, Chumarleb, and Soga. Nearby is another, Chang Tang, the second-largest reserve in the world and, at 334,000 square kilometers, more than 50 percent larger than Britain. About a third of Tibet’s lands are protected. They are home to rare wild animals such as the black-necked crane, huge-horned argali sheep, wild yak, white-lipped deer, gazelle, snow leopards, and, of course, the chiru.

Selected as a mascot for the Beijing Olympics, the chiru, a talismanic creature that is actually more goat than antelope, is much in demand for its fine shahtoosh wool. At least three animals have to be killed to produce a single shawl. Despite being listed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora since 1979, they are still shot for their fleece. No reliable data exist on their numbers, but there is widespread agreement among scientists that the population dropped precipitously in the 1990s from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands. The wildlife zoologist Richard Harris says the poaching was as vital to the local economy as opium cultivation in Afghanistan or coca growing in Colombia. 27Just as in those cases, the blame for the illegal trade ultimately rested with rich Western consumers who buy expensive shahtoosh shawls.

Chiru numbers have recovered somewhat in recent years thanks to strengthened government conservation efforts. But all too often the protected status of the animals is not backed with enforcement. Tibet has one of the lowest levels of nature reserve staff in China. 28Poaching remains rampant. In 2008, one poacher was caught with 400 skins. 29Many more killings go undetected.

Like everything else in Tibet, wildlife conservation is a political issue. One of the biggest acts of defiance in 2006 was the mass burning of animal pelts after the Dalai Lama said he felt ashamed that Tibetans wear clothes made from endangered species. 30The burnings of otter, leopard, tiger, and fox skins became such a symbol of loyalty to the exiled leader that Chinese authorities reacted by ordering Tibetan TV presenters to wear fur during broadcasts.

Peering through a pair of binoculars, our driver saw a chiru far in the distance on the stony plain. He passed the glasses over so I could see the beautiful, funny-looking creature with snowy white hindquarters. It gazed curiously in our direction for a while, then bounded off as soon as we tried to approach.

The chiru is famously shy. Designers of the railway added underpasses to allow the beasts, as well as yaks and wild asses, to migrate without disturbance. The effectiveness of these measures was hotly contested. Tibetan overseas groups claimed the passages were too narrow and animals often panicked and stampeded with fatal results. Nonsense, retorted Chinese scientists, who claimed more than 95 percent of chiru used the passes.

The political sensitivity of the issue was demonstrated in 2006 by an award-winning photograph that appeared to show chiru bounding healthily below a passing train. The harmonious image of Tibetan nature and Chinese technology side by side was selected as one of the photographs of the year by the state broadcaster CCTV. But it was faked. The Xinhua photographer claimed he waited eight days and nights in a bunker for the shot, but it transpired it was knocked up in a few hours using Photoshop software. The harmonious ideal was a computer fabrication. 31

Downstream from the glacier and far across an endlessly bleak plain was our destination, the station at Tuotuohe. The biggest town between Golmud and the Tibetan border was the archetypal frontier community, a narrow strip of grubby buildings populated by a few hundred railway workers, soldiers, truck drivers, and the providers of the services they sought: gas stations, restaurants, open-air pool tables, rough beds, and a brothel. The town was such a dot in the middle of nowhere that our government map located its position incorrectly. But that didn’t stop an endless stream of trucks from roaring through on the road that General Mu built, which, until the railway, was the main channel for the manufactured goods flowing into Tibet and the minerals flowing out.