Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

Using these munitions was tricky. No two clouds were ever the same. Even a single cumulus changed constantly as it blew over varying landscapes at different altitudes across a range of temperatures. Some water was colder than ice. Some rain evaporated before it hit the ground. The variables were so great that scientists in many countries doubted cloud-seeding could ever work, but in Gansu as elsewhere in China, it was adopted with gusto.

“It is very effective. We have centers like this all over the region. We are very advanced,” my guide explained. “Don’t you make rain in your country?”

I replied that, in Britain, everyone complains because it is too wet.

“You are lucky. Our land is very dry. We need extra rain. There are rockets or pellet-firing guns across the region. If we see a cloud, we will try to make it rain.”

Weather modification was applied on a massive scale to clear the gray skies before important political events, such as the 2008 Olympics and the parade for the sixtieth anniversary of Communist Party rule in 2009. But its main use was as a short-term fix for alleviating drought. In some areas, the competition for clouds caused bad blood between neighboring communities. In central Henan Province, five arid cities raced each other to induce precipitation over their areas. In one case, officials from Zhoukou complained bitterly that Pingdingshan had intercepted a downpour that had been heading their way. By the time it arrived in their region, only the dregs were left. 25

Ma Dubin enthusiastically lauded the talents of his country’s weather-modifying scientists, but he was less upbeat about impact of other forms of development on his own life and environment when he took me for a short walk outside the base to the home where he was born.

It was a cave, one of dozens that pocked the red loess. Carving houses into the hillsides was the norm here for centuries, but all the residents had been moved into brick homes over the previous twenty years. Ma missed the old way of life. In the cave, he said, each family had more space and the community spirit was stronger. The fuel bills were lower too because caves were warm in the winter and cool in the summer.

“I’d go back if I could, but it’s not the way things are done these days. Cave dwelling is seen as too poor and backward,” Ma sighed, crumbling some of the dry red earth in his hands.

Water was a perennial problem. In this regard, technology and economic development had brought only mixed benefits. When Ma was a child, wells had to be at least fifty meters deep to find an aquifer. Lugging up the heavy buckets was such a tough job that villages used mules to pull water up from underground. Now, however, the government piped water to their homes from the Datong River in neighboring Qinghai Province. The taste was salty. “We can drink the water, but it is not as sweet as before,” said Ma.

The immense engineering effort needed to plumb these arid hills was evident everywhere. A long, dry concrete channel curled around the foot of the hills on its way from the distant river to the fields it irrigated in the spring and summer. The slopes were painstakingly terraced with young fir trees, the base of each carefully guarded against the elements with a rampart of earth. Iron pipes ran up and down the dusty yellow hillsides to provide water to these thirsty plants. The authorities had clearly invested a huge amount of money and labor to keep trees alive in this inhospitable environment. Was it worth it? Ma had no doubt. “Yes. It may look a little yellow now. But come back in the summer. Everything is green. The scenery looks very good.”

Many disagreed. The rockets and planes, pipes and terracing were part of the nation’s battle against the desert. Political careers and big sums of money were being made and lost on expensive projects. But there were divisions within the ranks about how the campaign should be waged.

Driving from Zhongchuan to Lanzhou, I got a better idea of the scale and the expense of the project. For more than half of the 90-kilometer journey the red hillsides had been terraced, irrigated, and planted with trees, none of which looked particularly robust. The natural climate had always been tough for vegetation. Now the environment was being made worse by hundreds of brick kilns that lined the sides of the road, filling stretches of the long corridor with smoke. The kilns had been worked with convict labor since 2005, when most young locals migrated south in search of higher-paid work. The bricks of the new China were being made with loess dust and prisoners’ sweat.

The scraggy knee-high pines on the slopes received more government attention than many of Gansu’s impoverished children. Keeping the plants alive so that visitors to the province got a good first impression after flying into the airport had cost the city more than 1 billion yuan and used up precious supplies of fuel and water from the Yellow River.

Local scientists were appalled. In Lanzhou, I visited Wang Tao, the director of the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute and one of the chief strategists in China’s battle against the desert. He did not bother to hide his contempt toward the tree-planting project I had just driven through. “I have been opposed from the beginning. The local government asked my institute to prepare this project ten years ago and we refused. So they found an external organization to do the planning. But it is too expensive. You cannot make such dramatic changes to the environment in such a short time.”

In the summer, he said, the green trees and shrubs made for a pleasant landscape, but the conditions were so tough that half of them needed to be replaced every year.

“The intention was good. They wanted to improve the environment. But they rushed their decision, misjudged the costs, and failed to act on the results. It was a mistake.”

Other Chinese academics complained, but the project was locked into place by political and financial interests. “Once started, it can’t be withdrawn, so the project has to be maintained,” said Wang, shrugging. “It seems ambitious but it doesn’t work. It is against nature. We human beings cannot change the landscape. It works in a few areas if we pay a high price. But to do it over, the whole of the Loess Plateau is another story.”

Wang’s specialty was aeolian desertification, or wind erosion. This phenomenon was associated with economic loss, political instability, and social upheaval. From the 1950s to the 1990s, Wang said, China experienced a similar problem to that seen in the dust bowls of the U.S.A. in the 1930s, or in the USSR in the 1940s. He had photos of the enemy assault, vast, menacing dust storms of red, white, or gray particles that billowed out like tidal waves or mushroom clouds. He then showed images of the aftermath: homes deluged by sand, roads blocked, and farmland ruined. Most spectacular were the images of the Great Wall being breached by the northern sands. 26

The problem was not new, but it had become much worse over the last fifty years of the twentieth century. During that time, an area almost twice the size of Britain had turned into wind-racked desert, threatening 170 million people. Climate change was adding to the stress by making the north steadily hotter and drier. But, overwhelmingly, he said, the main cause was human activity.

As the combined number of China’s human population and head of livestock tripled, what was left of the topsoil was stripped away, exposing the dust to the gales that blew across the plateau.

“It really is like the title of that film … How do you say it in English?” Wang asked.

“ Gone with the Wind ?”

“Yes, that’s it. Gone with the wind.”

This was an enormous threat to the nation’s food security. About a third of the organic carbon in the soil of northern China was lost, which meant more artificial fertilizers were needed to maintain harvests. If the drought intensified, Wang feared harvests could decline by 20 percent and Gansu could start to resemble the most devastated parts of Africa.