Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

To help the earth recover, he and other thinkers at the institute advised the government to adopt an approach that was almost the opposite of the thinking during the Great Leap Forward. Rather than attempting conquest by throwing people, fertilizer, and water at the desert, Wang favored a strategic retreat. In essence, it was Taoist. Doing nothing was an effective action. That meant paying farmers in the most arid areas to abandon their cropland. This allowed shrubs to return and the soil to recover naturally, which eased the demand for irrigation.

“We stop farming the land. We allow it to recover as grazing land. Sometimes we help it artificially. But usually we just leave it. We don’t even need water. Normally it can recover by itself after five or ten years. Our former director proposed turning the affected areas into a huge national park, like the ones in the United States. 27If it was only used for sightseeing, the land could recover in twenty or thirty years.”

For a while it seemed to work. The dust storms eased. But demand for arable land was growing. The Taoist policy of paying people to allow farm fields to return to their natural state was shelved. The Foolish Old Men once again took over from the Useless Tree philosophers. Instead of trimming the demands on the land, the government shifted back toward boosting supply. Anti-desertification efforts focused on tree planting, water diversion, and high-tech allocation of the Yellow River’s resources.

But more land needs irrigating, more power stations need cooling, and more city dwellers need drinking water. As coal production is ramped up in Inner Mongolia, as urbanization accelerates in Henan, and as irrigation expands in Shandong, the river’s resources look likely to be spread ever thinner.

Attacking the clouds might help. But without greater efforts at conservation and tougher measures to curb pollution, the desert could subsume stretches of the Yellow just as it has claimed sections of the Great Wall. The geographic frontiers of human activity are written in water and erased with sand. China is making ever more desperate efforts to control both, but a third factor is making this increasingly difficult: a changing climate.

When Zhao Songling set out for heaven in 1959, he could not have realized how important his adventure would seem half a century later in awakening China to the impact of climate change. In fact, the science student barely even knew where he was going.

In his fourth year at Peking University, Zhao was dispatched to Xinjiang by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The far-western region was the target of a massive campaign to “open up the wastelands.” True to the spirit of the Great Leap Forward, when Mao declared war on nature, it was a quasi-military operation. The soldier-settlers in the bingtuan (production/ construction) PLA corps were on a mission to turn desert into farmland and produce food for a hungry, fast-growing nation.

His new home was an alien environment. Zhao was a Han from the densely populated coastal plains. Xinjiang was a land of Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other ethnic groups spread sparsely across an area seven times the size of Britain. Nowhere on the planet was farther from the sea. Nowhere in China was hotter.

Over centuries, the locals had developed lifestyles suited to their climate. Many Kazakhs were nomadic herders who followed the seasons in their movements up and down mountain pastures. The Uighurs were oasis dwellers used to conserving scarce water supplies. The new settlers, on the other hand, had been brought up in the irrigation culture of the flood-plains. Faced with the challenge of cultivating extensive tracts of arid land, they farmed as their ancestors had done: diverting rivers, streams, lakes, and any other source of water they could find.

During the Great Leap Forward, even that was considered inadequate. In the China of 1959, mankind was believed to have unlimited potential, the earth unbounded fertility. All the soil needed was water. There was plenty of that locked in the mountains as snow and ice. The challenge was how to get it down to the plains.

Zhao joined an exploration to the Tian (heaven) Mountains with five other scientists, ten mule drivers, and two PLA soldiers to guard against wild animals. Setting out from Urumqi, the regional capital, and traversing hundreds of kilometers west to Aksu, theirs was the first systematic study of glaciers in Xinjiang. It was to stimulate some of the earliest debates in China on climate change and mankind’s impact on the environment.

Zhao’s group was simply investigating the ice fields, but scientists elsewhere were already attempting to milk the mountains. Under the instructions of senior government scientist Zhu Gangkun and Soviet advisers, several glaciers in the far west were targeted for accelerated melting. 2The military tried bombing the ice, but that wasted munitions. In Gansu, scientists attempted a slightly more scientific approach: they blackened the ice with coal dust to make it absorb more heat.

Spreading coal dust across a sea of ice and snow was no easy task. For more than a month during the summer of 1959, thousands of workers at six locations in Gansu trudged up and down the slopes to the snow line bearing sacks of the stuff. 3

As irresponsible as this seems today amid fears that global warming is melting the world’s ice, in the 1950s, this was considered heroic, patriotic work. Propaganda posters of the time showed scientists in planes dropping grenades on ice fields, a fitting image for the prevailing ethos. 4Greenhouse gases were unheard of. Nature was something to be overcome rather than protected; mountains were remote, daunting objects to be conquered. This way of thinking was evident in other countries around this time too. In the United States in 1962, the Humble Oil Company, which later became Exxon, ran a double-page advert in Life magazine that claimed, “Each Day Humble Supplies Enough Energy to Melt 7 Million Tons of Glacier!” For the U.S. firm it was a figurative boast. In China, it was—for a while—state policy.

The result of this bold thinking was disaster: yet another of the Great Leap Forward’s ill-conceived experiments. Across the country, similarly reckless policies decimated food production and led to a devastating famine. The glacier melting operation was less deadly, but it proved to be a complete waste of time, money, and effort.

“The Gansu team were heavily criticized and their work was stopped,” recalled Zhao. “Their original intention was good. They wanted to solve the problem of drought. Coating snow with coal dust really did provide more water in the short term, but in the long term it made things worse.”

That lesson, learned in the distant mountains of Xinjiang, was to become still more relevant fifty years later, when the entire planet was coated with so much carbon that the mountains once again started to melt. Zhao’s mission, which marked the birth of glaciology in China, ensured that China understood the consequences.

The first ice field they encountered, unimaginatively named Urumqi Number One, has become a benchmark for climate change in China. 5Retracing Zhao’s steps on a journey to the west, I learned that the measurements taken here since the 1950s have done more than anything to convince a skeptical nation that it needs to act on global warming. In Xinjiang, one of the nation’s most strategically important regions, climate change was becoming a national security issue.