Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

Since ancient times, emperors have tried to harness the Yellow in the fight against the desert. It has proved a fickle ally. The river bears the burden of thousands of years of environmental degradation. No other waterway in the world carries as much silt. 7Most of it comes from the Loess Plateau, which is a France-sized monument to erosion. The fragile soil here was formed by layers of windblown dust accumulated over two million years and held in place by trees and other vegetation. But about 5,000 years ago, soon after man began felling trees and clearing land for cultivation, the loess returned to its windblown state. Stripped of its protective layer, billions of tons of orange loess dust are carried off by the river, hence its name. One theory has it that the first mention of Huanghe (Yellow River) came in the Han era around 2,000 years ago, when the water started to discolor.

The soil erosion has turned vast expanses of Gansu, Inner Mongolia, and Shaanxi into dust bowls. Beijingers feel the consequences every spring when the city is buffeted by sandstorms. The riparian communities along the Yellow are more likely to suffer in the summer, when the combination of sediment buildup and floodwater used to make the river writhe destructively up and down the delta. 8Accumulated downstream, the silt raises the surface of the water far above the land, with often devastating consequences. 9Millions have died in the roughly 1,500 floods recorded in the Yellow’s history, hence its other nickname “China’s Sorrow.” 10

Ancient rulers were judged by their ability to tap and placate this river. Even today, the giant dam at Sanmenxia is inscribed with the words “When the Yellow River is at peace, China is at peace.” 11The saying is attributed to the legendary emperor Yu ( c. 2100 BC), who is seen as the first in a long line of hydroengineering leaders that continues to this day. 12The challenge they face now is not how to tame the river but how to keep it alive. With more hydro plants, thirstier cities, and ever greater demands from agriculture, the Yellow has come close to choking. 13Just how near became shockingly apparent in 1997, when it failed to reach the sea for 226 days. If that was not bad enough, the artery is also growing more polluted. 14

An ancient folk saying predicts the Yellow will one day lose its (dis)color. The phrase Shengren chu, Huanghe qing (When a great man emerges, the Yellow River will run clear) was once an aspiration. Now, however, this seems so unlikely that the saying has become the Chinese equivalent of “And pigs might fly.” Far from becoming clearer, the spurt of industrial growth in recent years has made the river so polluted it has at various times run not just yellow but pink, green, red, black, and brown. 15

From Wei’s village I drove to see the source of the worst contamination, the border between Ningxia and Inner Mongolia. The water along this stretch cooled and cleansed the thickest cluster of heavy industry I had seen in China. In return it received hot, dirty emissions that left the water so polluted that it was designated too toxic to touch. 16The buildup started near Huinong City, where the banks of the river were punctuated by smokestacks, cooling towers, fertilizer plants, plastic factories, and paper mills. More dramatic still were the scenes on the other side of the city’s bridge as we entered the industrial hellhole of Wuhai. Dust, smog, and exhaust fumes commingled so densely between the barren gray mountain slopes that it was at first hard to make out what was happening on the rocky plain between. Closer up, giant signs for the metallurgical plants and chemical refineries could be made out looming among the tangle of electricity pylons. Giant trucks rumbled out of the gates, churning up grit into the foul-smelling air as they joined an eight-lane jam of mobile tonnage. Farther along the road, smoke poured in hundreds of narrow streams from chimneys atop the long, identical rows of Lowrey-esque redbrick homes.

In just ten years, this blasted outpost had swollen from four factories to five hundred. 17Dozens more were under construction. It was aweinspiringly grim. Farther on, sand specters whispered across the road, curling patterns on the tarmac. Tumbleweed bounced madly in our path. Cyclists and pedestrians wore face masks but still grimaced in the grit and sand. On the roadside, fields gave way to dunes, and thick clouds of sand blurred visibility at ground level, though I could see blue skies above. “This is nothing,” said our driver. “In a real sandstorm the sky grows so dark that you can’t see more than twenty meters.”

Areas of land were still being farmed, but the soil was so degraded that only sunflowers could be planted. When I saw the first patch of alkaline discoloration, I thought it was a sprinkling of snow. But the pale blotches came from the fertilizer and industrial pollution that had seeped into the soil. The white earth appeared to have been sterilized.

In other areas, the pollution was black. We stopped at Wulateqianqi County, the site of a recent contamination incident. The collapse of dikes at two paper-mill containment ponds released a tidal wave of toxic sludge across farmland, two villages, and a stream that flowed into the Yellow River. Fifty-seven homes were destroyed and crops ruined. 18

I arrived unannounced at the home of Yang Kuan, one of the affected farmers. He was welcoming. Word went around family and neighbors. Soon a small crowd were sitting on the kang 19telling me their story.

The gathering was noisy. Feelings were running high as the family recalled the black wave that swept through their lives. Before the incident, the paper mills, Saiwai Xinghuazhang and Meili Beichen, had been ordered to shut down because of their repeated violations of emissions regulations. An earlier spill had killed tens of thousands of fish in the Yellow River.

But, as was often the case in China, the companies ignored the order and continued to operate. On the day in question, it looked as though a rainstorm would flood the mill’s containment ponds and contaminate the Yellow River again. Fearing fines and more criticism, the management channeled their pollution onto farmland instead. There was no warning to local people.

Scraping a living in the dry north had never been easy. After the incident, it became almost impossible. Yang took me out to the fields to see the consequences. It was bitterly cold, but he wanted to show me the land he had lost to the stinking black waters.

“It is ruined. We used to grow corn and wheat, but now it is not really even fit for sunflowers. Nobody wants to buy from us anyway because our crops have been tainted,” he complained, shaking his head, then repeating himself, “We can’t grow anything now.”

A short distance away, a coal-fired power plant belched smoke into the sky. Part of its energy would go to the paper mills, which were still in business.

The village well was still too polluted to drink so the family had to use the foul water from the taps. The small government allowance they had received by way of compensation was due to run out in a year. 20“After that I guess we will have to steal or beg,” Yang said. “We have no other income.”

Pollution and drought feed off one another. Contaminated streams and wells worsen water shortages. Rivers with low volumes and weak flows are less capable of flushing out toxins. Both threaten the fertility of the land and the health of the people. Both are evident across northeast China, where temperatures are also rising because of climate change.

Of the 600 cities facing water shortages in China, the vast majority lie either along the Yellow River Delta or in the lands that stretch north from there up to and beyond the Great Wall.

As the quality and quantity of surface water declines, people mine deeper and deeper for alternative supplies. The water table in northern China is falling by more than a meter a year, forcing farmers to dig deeper wells and cities to suck ancient aquifers dry. That is unsustainable. These underground resources might take hundreds of years to be replenished. Tang Xiyang, one of the founders of the green movement in China, described the trend to me in apocalyptic terms: “The Yellow River civilization has been destroyed. People cannot survive on that river anymore.”