Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

But, later, as he smoked and smiled, his wife, Guo, did most of the talking. During their childhood, she said, they often had no money for clothes and no food at all. Wei’s young brother died of starvation during the famine of 1930. Thirty-one years later, after the Great Leap Forward, there was another. Guo recalled starving people from neighboring villages dropping dead in the streets as they went out to forage for food. Ten years earlier, they had suffered again: when their son and his wife, who already had two children, broke family-planning regulations by having twins, half the family’s land and furniture was confiscated as a punishment.

Life was still tough today. Guo told me about conditions in a neighboring village deeper in the hills. “There are droughts nine out of ten years,” she said, “so they learn to make one harvest last a decade.”

“Why don’t they move like you did?” I asked. “The authorities are doing it in stages. It isn’t easy to find land for everyone. And not everybody wants to move.”

I asked her to take me to their old home. It was a twenty-minute drive across a rutted, blasted landscape of crumbling orange earth, gray grit, and splotches of white alkaline discoloration. Bleakly beautiful though it was, I struggled to imagine how such an environment could support human life, or life of any sort.

We drove alongside a dry riverbed that usually flooded just once a year for just four or five hours and then trickled dry. On the far bank I spied several dozen mud-brick buildings in various stages of collapse. It looked like an ancient ruin.

“That’s where we lived,” Guo said.

We got out of the car, walked across the riverbed, clambered up a bank dusted with white alkaline deposits, and entered the ghost village. Eight hundred people had lived here a few years earlier, but it was now in the process of being repossessed by the elements. All that was left of the community were crumbling walls, torn paper windows, and fading New Year decorations on the doors.

Guo’s was the only one still locked. She opened it up and invited us inside. The house was spacious and well proportioned with a large courtyard. In its day, it would probably have been the best in the village. But the poverty was evident in the rough earthen floor and the newspapers used to insulate and decorate the walls. There was no running water, no electricity. “This was our light,” said Guo, holding out an old Red Bull can with a kerosene wick sticking out of the opening.

The area was barely fit for human habitation. In the winter the ground froze and snow often blanketed the land. In spring and summer the village was frequently buffeted by sandstorms that choked the lungs and scratched the faces of residents. Guo said these had become more frequent and more frightening in recent years. Crops had become harder to grow. It was drier, warmer than in the past. There was less rainfall. Life was unbearably tough.

I was surprised that I had not yet seen the Great Wall, even though one of the oldest sections was marked on the map as being next to the old village. Considering that the wall was widely (though incorrectly) believed to be the only man-made structure visible from space, it seemed strange that it was not obvious. I asked Guo where it was.

“It is just outside, though it is not easy to make out,” she replied.

That proved an understatement. Long before the village, the Great Wall in this area had been claimed by the harsh environment. All that was left was a snaking mound of mud that blended into the landscape. The heaped-earth ramparts had been abandoned more than a century ago and were now covered in gravel and scrub. Guo had to point out where they once stood, the swelling of red earth that I had just crunched under my feet. Visible from space? It was barely visible even as I stood on top of it.

The same thing was happening to mankind’s best-known fortification as was happening to the rest of northern China. The threat of drought and desertification was evident the entire length of the Great Wall, from Xinjiang in the far west to Hebei on the east coast, over 6,000 kilometers away.

China’s ancient fortifications are far more complex and environmentally significant than is commonly understood. Contrary to its singular name, the Great Wall is a series of ramparts and spurs, as well as the main trunk that snakes across northern China. In part, they are made of little more than mud. Elsewhere, they are impressive brick structures.

Construction of many of the best-known stretches began in the Qin era (221–206 BC) to keep out northern invaders. Over the following centuries, the walls were widened, lengthened, and strengthened. This massive engineering project separated two cultures and ecosystems. The settled Han agriculturalists of the southern plains wanted to protect their fields from the roaming Mongol pastoralists of the northern steppe. The wall marked the boundary between their two differing approaches to nature: fixed control versus nomadic anarchy. The cultures reflected the environments: fields and valleys against sand dunes and grassland. The wall was an attempt to keep both the climate and the enemy at bay.

It was unsuccessful on both counts. The wall was breached by both at various times in history. Mark Elvin, an environmental historian, has linked the territorial power shifts with climate change. 3In extended eras of low temperatures—such as the Little Ice Age—the Mongolian nomads were driven south to escape the cold and find new grassland and food sources. During warmer periods, the Han were able to expand their fields northward. The Great Wall was once a boundary between China and Mongolia, but the territory of the Han now stretches hundreds of kilometers farther north. The sands, however, are not so easily conquered. For decades, northern deserts have been invading southern arable land. The Great Wall was no defense. More than half of the original structure is either buried, crumbling, or torn down. 4

Standing on the crenellated outline of the buried ramparts, I could see why William Lindesay, one of the first to walk the length of the wall, described it as “the backbone of a dinosaur.” 5The structure here was the broken relic that seemed to belong more to archaeology than history.

Guo and Wei were part of a mass retreat to the southeast. After centuries of land conquest and reclamation, the government was moving millions of people off fragile land that could no longer bear their weight. Pan Yue, deputy minister of the state environmental protection ministry, estimated that desertification would force the resettlement of 186 million people, about one in seven of the population.

Guo accepted that there was no choice: “We had to move because there was no water. There were times when we couldn’t grow things for ourselves so we relied on government support. But in the new place, life is better. We can grow our own food because they have diverted the Yellow River to ensure we have enough water.” 6

We said farewell and wished the eco-refugees luck. Driving back to the main road, I saw the massive plumbing operation that made Guo and Wei’s new lives possible. The fields were flanked by concrete channels, intersected by steel pipes, and overshadowed by a giant elevated water tank. These hydroengineering works represented a fallback line of defense against the sands. But this barrier too was vulnerable because it depended on China’s most overused and abused resource: the Yellow River.

Even before the rush of modern development there were few harder-working waterways on the planet. For almost half its 5,465-kilometer length, the world’s sixth-largest river passes through desert sands, loess, and arid grasslands, nurturing 140 million people. Without the “Mother River,” as it is also called, there would be little cultivation in these dry northern plains and China as we know it would not exist. The Middle Kingdom emerged between the Great Wall and the Yellow River. Both are vital elements in the battle against entropy. Ultimately, the skeleton of Han civilization is made up of walls and dikes.