Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

I recalled Mark Elvin’s theory about the link between changes in global temperatures and power shifts between different cultures. He observed that cooling often coincided with dynastic crises in China, when the Mongolian nomads of the northern steppe tended to intrude southward. 28By contrast, Han society, which was based on the irrigation of low-lying plains, had historically thrived during warmer eras when the area of cultivatable land pushed north. This might partly explain the hesitation of Chinese scientists to consider climate change as a threat. But the warming could shift from the comfort zone.

It was not far from heaven to hell in Xinjiang. At the foot of the Tian Mountains was the Turpan Depression, the lowest and hottest place in China. In classical literature, this was a symbol of murderous heat. During the Tang dynasty (618–907), the poet Cen Shen wrote, “No living thing can dwell on this mountain, Even birds dare not fly over.” During the summer months, currents of hot air were said to roll up the barren red sandstone slopes of the nearby Flaming Mountain like tongues of fire. Many travelers passed by on the Silk Road, some recording a climate that always seemed to be summer. The most memorable account was by the Buddhist fabulist Wu Cheng’en of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). In his novel Journey to the West, Flaming Mountain was so hot that the Buddhist monk Tripitaka and his guardian, the Monkey King, were unable to progress on their quest for enlightenment to Gandhara in India. They learned that the only way to cool the earth was to win over Princess Iron Fan. Today, this episode reads like a global-warming parable or at least a potential advertisement for the wind-turbine manufacturers whose blades are now spinning across much of Xinjiang and northwest China.

Climate change was difficult to pin down. It was too complicated and contradictory to squeeze easily into a given formula. In a small number of cases, glaciers were expanding. The dry plains of Xinjiang were getting more rain than in the past. Some research suggested deserts were absorbing more carbon than previously believed. Assessing the impact was also fraught with imprecision. Global warming was rarely solely responsible for anything. Instead, it intensified existing natural phenomena, such as the summer storms, and accelerated many of the worst trends of human development, such as desertification. In some areas, it even seemed to be beneficial. On the coastal plains, Han farmers enjoyed increased yields as a result of the extra warmth and moisture.

The negative impacts tended to be apparent on the geographic peaks and in the economic depressions. The most dramatic temperature changes were found inland, on high ground during the winter. Melting glaciers in Tibet, Qinghai, Gansu, and Sichuan, dried-up lakes in Hebei and Inner Mongolia, as well as ferocious storms and floods in Guangxi, Guangdong, and Zhejiang. In the mountain forests of Sichuan and Yunnan, sensitive species of orchid, insect, and reptile were dying out as the temperature warmed. 29Off the coasts of Liaoning, striped seal populations were declining along with the icebergs. Among humans, the worst affected were almost always the poorest: nomads who lost their herds when grasslands were engulfed by deserts, farmers on poor land whose crops shriveled up in droughts, and riverside dwellers whose shacks were destroyed in floods. Usually, they were people living closest to nature. Many were Han. But disproportionately, the impact was probably felt most by the ethnic minorities. 30As they lost livelihoods or escaped to cities, tensions rose. Emotions were particularly strong when indigenous people saw their land and natural resources being taken at the same time by an influx of economic migrants.

People were increasingly drawn to Urumqi because it was becoming the center of oil and gas production in central Asia. 31The old Silk Road had been reinforced with pipelines, railways, and highways. 32Driving back along the road from the glacier to the regional capital, the dominance of the high-carbon economy was evident in cooling towers, smokestacks, oil drums, and gas pipes.

On the outskirts of the city, massive refineries, vast storage drums, and a tangle of pipes marked the presence of the world’s first trillion-dollar company, PetroChina. 33With overseas partners, this state-run firm populated the Turpan and Tarim basins with ketouji (lit., “kowtowing machines”), the “nodding donkeys” that bow back and forth hypnotically as they pump millions of tons of oil from under the sand.

Viewed from Urumqi, the government’s “Go West” campaign to redistribute wealth to poorer inland regions looks more like a “Take East” extraction of energy resources. The flow of oil from the desert and melt-water from the mountains has created a boomtown, but most of the new money has been sucked up by Han settlers.

In the 1950s, Urumqi was a gritty sprawl of 100,000 Uighurs living in two-or three-story mud-brick homes arranged in narrow sand-colored curling alleyways. Poverty was so widespread and health care so rudimentary that people would count themselves lucky to live beyond forty years of age. Traveling here in the 1930s, the English missionary Mildred Cable uncharitably described it as a place possessing “no beauty, no style, no dignity.” 34

Similar terms could be used in the modern age, but for a very different cityscape. As the local economy tore along at a 20–30 percent annual growth rate, Urumqi extended farther across the plains and up into the sky, sucking up water supplies along the way. As the Han settlers poured in, Uighur alleyways gave way to six-lane city streets, square high-rises, and concrete squares. Among the big new water-guzzling developments are the Snow Lotus Mountain Golf Club and the Silk Road International Ski Resort. 35

The thirst of these luxury sports facilities is slaked by the extra runoff from Urumqi Number One and the 154 other glaciers that feed the river basin. The melt doubled in the twenty years after 1985 and is likely to continue rising for several decades. After that, if the glaciologists are right, Urumqi is at risk of evaporating along with its water supply.

The central government has long been aware of the risks, but it is only in recent years that it has identified the planetary causes. In 2007, it issued the country’s first national plan on climate change, spelling out policies for afforestation, recyclable energy development, and a raft of other countermeasures nationwide. Xinjiang’s planners have also realized that they need to find somewhere other than golf greens and artificial pistes to invest their water bonanza. They built an eco-park to promote a more sustainable lifestyle among residents, announced plans to build fifty-nine reservoirs to catch glacier meltwater, and were considering augmenting this with subterranean storage pools. 36But a still more radical plan was also under consideration. To explore it fully, Premier Wen Jiabao dispatched a special envoy with a reputation for earthshakingly ambitious ideas.

Qian Zhengying was very short, very old, and extremely controversial. A former minister of water conservancy and power, she had been in the senior ranks of government throughout the Great Leap Forward. Even after retirement she was a driving force in the Three Gorges Dam project. Few politicians generated such a mix of hatred and respect. 37

We met for an interview shortly after she had finished a fact-finding tour of Turpan. She had been there to see if Xinjiang’s rich coal seams could be exploited. But what she found was China’s worst water problem. “We studied every glacier. Because of global warming, we found the small glaciers are melting quickly. So until 2020 the water in the rivers may well increase, but what happens after that when the meltwater is gone?” asked the tiny, wizened figure who managed to fill a giant government chamber with her presence.