Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

“Masahiro, can I talk to you about religion?”

“Sure. Anything,” he beamed.

“Well, perhaps this is too British a way of thinking. But in my understanding a priest or a monk should set an example. Do you agree?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Yet you drink more alcohol, you smoke more cigarettes, and you have more girlfriends than most people I know. What kind of example is that?”

He laughed. “That’s difficult to explain …”

“Please try. My behavior is not much different. But you’re a monk. Shouldn’t you be better? What is the example you are setting?”

He laughed again and leaned back on his chair. “Well, I have an 80 percent rule.”

“What’s that?”

“I only do 80 percent of what I could. The other 20 percent I hold back.”

“Could you give me an example?”

“Well, I could drink ten beers when I go out, but I only drink eight. And I could smoke a hundred cigarettes in a week, but I only smoke eighty …”

“What!” I exclaimed incredulously. “Are you saying that makes you a 20 percent better person?”

“It’s hard to explain. Buddhism is not easy to understand.”

I did not buy the argument at all. Masahiro was a good friend but a dubious Buddhist. He was winging it with this explanation, which sounded a lot like the shopaholic’s excuse for splurging in the sales: “I might have spent a fortune, but look how much I’ve saved!”

A similar mind-set lies behind China’s claims of efficiency gains. As in the West, although technology is making energy use less wasteful, it is also encouraging people to use more power. Overall, the result is increased consumption. Scant consideration appears to be given to the fact that resources are finite.

The second danger of relying too much on efficiency is that it stifles creativity and diversity: once something is found to work, it is repeated and expanded to the detriment of all else. I learned that in Shandong, where I went to observe mankind’s efforts to improve the fertility of the land and the sea.

When people talk about environmental problems in China, they usually focus on factories and emissions, but it is often farmland and fertilizer that create the biggest problems. The impact is most striking in Shandong. This huge coastal province generates more agricultural revenue than any other. 1It is China’s leading meat producer and its number two supplier of wheat and cotton. 2

Shandong’s history has been shaped by its geography. 3This is where the Yellow River flows into the Bohai Sea. Confucius was born here around 500 BC and his philosophy of human-centered order has recently enjoyed a resurgence, particularly in his hometown of Qufu.

My journey, though, began at Taishan, the holy mountain where emperors made pilgrimages to beg heaven and earth for the fertility of their land. They were pleading for the Mandate of Heaven. 4These imperial pilgrimages were made easier in 219 BC, when the tyrant Qin Shihuang had a path built up the mountain. Today, there is a tarmac road and a cable car.

After being winched above the clouds, we joined the tourist throngs wandering through the network of mountaintop temples. At a lower level was a shrine to the Princess of the Rosy Clouds, a Taoist deity believed to help childless women conceive. From there, steep steps led to the 1,532-meter peak, where even the mightiest of men was expected to show humility to the mythical ruler of heaven, the Jade Emperor. The rulers of old could look down from here with a mix of satisfaction and responsibility, knowing they controlled all that they could see across the vast plains and the Yellow Sea. The Taoist emperor Wu was lost for words and famously ordered his stone monument, the Wuzibei, left blank. Mao Zedong, by contrast, was inspired by a glorious sunrise to declare, “The East Is Red.”

On the day I reached the top, it looked more of a murky brown. On either side of the meteorological monitoring station to the east of the peak was a double horizon: the first where the land met the smog; the other where the smog met the sky. The moon appeared mockingly beautiful above them both.

Taishan’s role had changed. In the era of “Scientific Development,” China’s leaders no longer prayed for good harvests at the peak. Instead, they relied on the scientists at the foot of the mountain to find new chemical fertilizers and laboratory-engineered seeds. This was the site of the Shandong Agricultural University, which was pioneering China’s biggest study of genetically modified crops. 5It was on the front line of efforts to improve the efficiency of the country’s fields.

Shandong grows more genetically modified cotton than anywhere else in China and possibly the world. The U.S. agrichemical firm Monsanto found a willing partner here for its first insect-resistant hybrids. Scientists in the province are also developing salt-resistant tomatoes, soybeans, and rice, designed to grow on saline soil near the coast. Just as in hydroengineering, manufacturing, railway building, and skyscraper construction, China is poised to become a major biotechnology player. With laxer regulations and huge government investment, it already leads the world in GM rice. Scientists predict that half of the country’s agricultural produce will be genetically modified by 2015. 6

Though most of the initial bioengineering breakthroughs have been made in the West rather than by China’s agricultural scientists, it hasn’t been for want of trying. During the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, the government encouraged farmers to experiment with grafting and interbreeding. This led to some bizarre genetic experiments and fantastic claims of success, such as a rooster than could lay eggs, the breeding of an earless, tailless pig, ewes that could give birth to quintuplets, and a pumpkin as heavy as a man. Rabbits were interbred with cows and pear trees grown to produce apples. To save the need to dye textiles, scientists spliced cotton and tomato plants. The aim was to produce red fabric, but the results were closer to fluffy tomatoes. 7Today, the world sniggers at the crazy excesses of that era, but researchers across the globe are now conducting much bolder and more bizarre experiments.

Even before the Great Leap Forward in the East, scientists in the West were massively expanding yields with a Green Revolution based on nitrogen-and phosphate-based fertilizers, insecticides, mechanization, irrigation, and hybridization. As a species, we soon came to depend on these fertility stimulants. More than half the world’s population is now being fed by the extra production from technology and nitrate inputs rather than land expansion. 8

China was the new frontier for biotechnology. With a fifth of the world’s population to feed on a tenth of the planet’s arable land, the temptations of biotechnology had always been enormous. Urbanization and industrialization add to the pressures by taking land for factories, roads, and housing blocks. 9With the population expanding and appetites growing, China faced an uphill struggle to feed itself. As the economist Vaclav Smil noted: “All of the world’s grain exports together would fill less than two-thirds of the country’s projected demand for food.” 10

Desperate measures were needed to boost agricultural output, but there had been no big productivity breakthroughs for fifty years on the scale of the Green Revolution. Efficiency was made an overriding priority. The result was fields and fields of monotonous monoculture.

On the new motorway from the holy mountain Taishan to the experimental agriculture center at Linyi, I had a feeling of déjà vu. The landscape looked remarkably familiar, though I had never been this way before. Staring at flat brown fields, hazy gray skies, and row after shallow row of uniformly spindly poplar trees was like watching a minute-long clip on a daylong loop. It reminded me of the countryside in Henan, Hebei, and Beijing. On the North China plain, which stretches about 1,000 kilometers from the capital down to the Yangtze, you could travel for hours without feeling any sense of progress because every road looked the same. I used to think this was just because it was flat but then I met Mother Poplar.