Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

That was the media nickname for Zhang Qiwen, the genetics professor who was arguably responsible for changing a bigger chunk of the Chinese landscape than the emperors and engineers behind the Great Wall, the Three Gorges Dam, or the Sky Train railway to Tibet.

In 1980, soon after China opened up to the outside world, Zhang established the nation’s first poplar gene pool by importing hybrid seeds and saplings from Canada, the United States, and Italy. She embraced biotechnology with the gusto of a new convert and applied it with the single-minded utilitarianism of an old Maoist. The result was the spread of a now ubiquitous, lanky hybrid of the American Populus deltoides and European Populus nigra, aka Poplar Hybrid 107.

Developed in Italy more than ten years earlier, this hybrid and its near twin PH108 had failed to take root in most global forestry markets, 11but in northern China, thanks to Zhang, they came to dominate the landscape more than any subspecies of plant at any time in recorded history.

More than 1.5 billion were planted in just five years, covering a fifth of China’s entire forest area. Yet almost all of them were squeezed along roadsides in the crowded North China plains. 12As a result, from Liaoning in the north down to the Yangtze in the south, this single hybrid is everywhere. There are few more fitting symbols of modern monocultural civilization.

These endless lines of leaves on sticks are the twenty-first century’s superefficient substitute for the ancient forests. 13Imported, artificial, with a sparse canopy and a slender trunk, PH107 was designed for rapid growth without a thought for the wider environment. When Zhang came across PH107, it was love at first sight. The poplar is the cow of the tree world: quick to bulk up and easy to cut down. In China, it is bred for humans, mainly for industrial use or as a protective barrier for crop fields. In ideal conditions—supplied with lots of fertilizer and pesticide—it grows 3 meters a year in height and up to 4 centimeters in diameter, providing 60 percent more wood than a wild poplar.

“It’s about production, not ecology,” explained Zhang, a robust and kindly woman in a red poppy-patterned cardigan. Though retired, she retained something of the war-against-nature spirit of the Great Leap Forward. When I asked how the narrow canopies affected bird-nesting patterns, she laughed. “I have never thought about it.”

A query about cloning and testing techniques provoked a graphic analogy.

“Compare it to a baby. Imagine you [she pointed to me] have ten children with you [she pointed to my horrified assistant]. We choose the best one, chop off its arms and legs, then cut the torso into ten pieces, and plant them in the ground. They should grow up as identical clones, which we then measure as they grow in different conditions.”

I’m pretty sure she was referring to branches and trunks when she talked about limbs and torsos, but the language was indicative of a recklessness toward ecosystems and gender balance.

Tree and crop modification has a long history. In China, the ability to bend plants to man’s will was seen by the ancients as a mark of civilization. 14In the modern age, the United States and Europe blazed the trail of hybridization. Professor Zhang simply picked what she considered to be the best of the best. Her selection made her a national hero. On her wall was a group photograph with President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao. Mother Poplar was also often lauded in the state media.

PH107 has many good qualities. Poplars absorb more carbon than slower-growing trees, so they can help to tackle global warming. Their cultivation has eased China’s reliance on wood from illegally felled forests in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and Russia. 15In smaller numbers, the trees might even be considered attractive.

But their numbers are far from small. The domination of these twin female trees is not just an affront to Taoist ideals of balance and fengshui aesthetics, it is of dubious long-term economic benefit. Although the hybrids grow fast, they are sickly plants, vulnerable to disease and unable to reproduce. Most are cut down after six years, almost as soon as they start to flower and show other signs of reaching sexual maturity. Zhang described pollen as a form of pollution.

The techniques of modern forestry are no less degrading than the animal husbandry techniques used on giant pandas. This is not wholly China’s fault, but once again it has taken a global trend to a new extreme. Zhang was simply trying to help her country. She told me she was proud of putting poplars across northern China. But I was horrified at the consequences of her work. PH107 cultivation denied sex, destroyed beauty, and replaced local diversity with a superefficient standard. 16In that final narrow sense alone, PH107 might be considered a good thing. But you could have too much of a good thing.

Zhang was old-school. Trained at the height of the Great Leap Forward, she had wedded Maoist recklessness to Western science to conceive an ugly, superabundant hybrid. But, like the megadams of Sichuan, the wisdom of this approach has subsequently been questioned. A new generation of agricultural scientists is warning that the overcultivation of one efficient crop could result in the choking of everything else.

Professor Jiang Gaoming is one of them. He is a man of the Shandong soil who has grown into an eco-farming evangelist. We met at a banquet, where a relay of genetic engineering professors took it in turns to down glasses of baijiu rice liquor with me, the solitary foreign journalist. Moonfaced and jocular, Jiang joined in with the drinking and the card games that followed, but though he might make small talk with them, his views are utterly at odds with most of the agriculture scientists at his institute.

The next morning, as he drove me to a pilot project along roads lined with PH107, he spoke with passion of his love for his home province and his fury at modern agricultural practices that he believes are destroying the soil and ruining the landscape.

“Everyone in China needs money. They don’t care about biodiversity and the environment. A few of us in the science community care because it is our subject, but the government pays little heed. For them, a tree is just a tree.”

He railed against chemical fertilizers, pesticides, genetically modified crops, and the plastic sheeting that is spread across the land to trap moisture and heat for the cultivation of garlic. These modern techniques were a form of pollution, he said, that was sucking nutrient-rich, dark carbon out of the soil and turning the land pale. He sympathized with farmers who would do anything to increase yields, but he could not forgive agribusiness and its advocates in global corporations and local government.

“Shandong is number one in China for agricultural production, but this is also where you see the most problems,” he said. “Farmers used to be honest. If food was bad, they would withhold it from the market. But now they don’t care. They just want to make money. They see the income gap between the city and the countryside and they will do anything to catch up. But though they make poor-quality food for sale, they never eat it themselves.”

He said Chinese farmers use twice as much fertilizer and insecticide per hectare as their American counterparts. 17Despite the health risks, they add arsenic to artificially boost crop yields and melamine to disguise the low level of protein in milk. 18In the seed market, there were fewer and fewer subtypes because everyone bought the same few high-yield varieties. The same was true of poultry. The tasty native Shouguang chicken had been crossbred with a chunkier U.S. species to increase meat volume, but Jiang said the hybrid was only for supermarkets. None of the farmers want to eat this tasteless lab meat themselves. In a world of mass production, too much of a good thing quickly became bad. The obvious antidote was to make something bad good. For Jiang, that meant making better use of what we normally waste: stalks, husks, and manure.