Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

Smoking a cigarette and sitting in the bow of his skiff, Tan navigated the still waters, pausing every ten minutes to pour more coolant into the boat’s overheating outboard motor. Shouting over the noisy spluttering of his engine, the fisherman told me he was the youngest of five siblings and made the most money. Fishing, crabbing, and shrimping brought in 6,000 yuan a month, more than most white-collar jobs in China. But in recent years catches had declined as more people harvested the seas for a living. He said yapian and snakehead fish were becoming hard to find. The big money was made through aquaculture, the fastest-growing local business.

The vast offshore farms sat a couple of kilometers from the shore, where the surface of the water was pebbled with circular buoys. In 2008, it had been carpeted in blue-green slime. Green tides of algae had been increasing in frequency in these waters for several years due to the extra nitrates flowing in from the shoreline. But this outbreak was exceptional. The first blooms appeared soon after the May Day holiday when the water temperature was unusually warm. Within a month, the blooms grew with astonishing speed to cover an area of 13,000 square kilometers, several times the size of London. 43The twenty-eight-year-old said he had never seen anything like it.

“I don’t know what caused it or where it came from. It was just there all of a sudden, all over the place,” he recalled. For him, the slime was only an eyesore. For the local government, then preparing to host the Olympic sailing competition, it was a huge embarrassment. A layer of garish Enteromorpha/Ulva slime was not what the authorities had in mind when they coined the term “Green Olympics.” 44

An Ocean Cleaning Command Center was hurriedly established. Tan was recruited with the promise of 280 yuan per day and dispatched to help the clear-up of a beachfront area. He set out at five o’clock in the morning from Qingdao to join a flotilla of more than a thousand boats: skiffs, yachts, trawlers, and speedboats. The vessels came from as far away as Weihai and Jiaodong. He worked twelve hours a day, scooping up the algae with a net until his small skiff was full, then dumping it on the beach for collection. Every day he collected about a ton of the slime. Unlike the red algae, it was relatively harmless, so it could even be sold as feed to pig farmers. Under a summer sun it was hot, hard work, but Tan’s efforts were a drop in a bucket. The campaign lasted weeks. Some fishermen fell sick from the effort, but they never completely cleared up the estimated 170,000 tons of algae. Instead, the authorities stretched nets and a barrage across the coastal waters to prevent the gunk from invading the coastline. It did the job. The problem was pushed out of sight. Tan went back to fishing.

Listening to his story, I could imagine a time in the near future when algae would be hybridized, farmed on the ocean, and used as biomass fuel or fertilizer. 45Replacing the degraded land, the seascape would be divided up into fields of plankton, seaweed, and microphytes. Bigger marine species, now little more than algae-munching vermin or interesting curiosities, would be either wiped out or exiled to aquariums. Algae would be marketed as a health food. Our diets would consist of processed gunk …

My fantasy was interrupted by a tinny Chinese pop song. Tan’s mobile phone was ringing. Forty minutes from the port, the impressive range of the China Mobile signal was matched by the intrusive reach of officialdom. The call was from the police. “I’ve been ordered to bring you back to shore,” Tan said apologetically. “They say we are not allowed to take foreigners out to sea. You might be trying to leave illegally. I’m sorry.” It was absurd. We could never reach the nearest country, South Korea, on a boat that could barely make it to the nearest fishing ground. But we turned around and spluttered slowly back toward the haze-shrouded city. As we chugged along, I considered how desperate someone would need to be to try to escape on such a slow boat from China.

We had lost the chance to fish for lobster, but Tan shrugged, lit another cigarette, and steered his craft back toward port. The fisherman was an optimist. Like the farmers of Linyi, like almost everyone I met in China, he believed life was getting better.

But at what point would “getting better” become too good? Even with fertilizers and intensive farming, food prices were creeping up around the world. Despite aquaculture, fish stocks were in steep decline. Governments in China, Japan, and South Korea were so concerned about shortages they were buying up extra farmland in Africa. The Amazon rain forest and Brazilian savanna were being cleared for soy cultivation. 46Looming over all forecasts was climate change, which was likely to play havoc with agriculture and cut food production by as much as 40 percent by the second half of the century. 47

Incremental efficiency gains alone will not prevent the depletion of resources if the number of mouths and the size of appetites continue to grow at current rates. China, and humanity, will soon have to reduce demand to avoid a crisis. “Consume less!” is an extremely difficult message to sell to the public, particularly in Western democracies where electorates are used to being bought off with promises of ever-higher living standards. On the face of it, authoritarian China appears better placed to impose tough political decisions. Might autocratic leadership, mass mobilization, and draconian prohibitions succeed where elected governments seem doomed to failure? I traveled next to the freezing north to consider whether dictatorship could prove to be an environmental asset.

The temperature fell steadily as we rolled north to Harbin on the overnight train from Beijing. I had work to catch up on and was the last in the cozy compartment to snuggle down. By the time I closed the laptop and my eyes, I guess we were passing through the dark countryside of Liaoning. It was a restless night. In the early hours I woke up more than once because my feet were cold. They were sticking out from under the small duvet. I pulled them back, curled up as best I could, and went back to sleep. The conductor woke us at 6:30 a.m. With the light on, I could see why my toes had been chilly. The window at the end of my bed was encrusted with icicles. At minus 22 degrees, the temperature outside was so low that condensation had frozen to the frame inside.

Ice was the main attraction of Harbin, the capital of China’s northernmost province of Heilongjiang. Winter was the tourist season. Tens of thousands of southerners flocked to the city for the exotic sight of slush on the streets and snow on the roofs. The frozen Songhua River was a playground of skaters, dogsleds, ice slides, and pony traps. Techno music blared across the whitescape as cable cars trundled overhead. The highlight came at night, when thickly quilted crowds thronged to the Ice Lantern Festival, where they could wander around garishly illuminated castles and palaces carved out of frozen water. These were no ordinary igloos. Some ice structures were so immense they had their own escalators and elevators. With Disney sponsoring for the first time, the organizers were worried global warming would cut the season short again.

The Cold War seemed a distant memory. But I was in Heilongjiang to measure the ideological temperature. I wanted to see to what extent the world’s biggest one-party state could provide a model for other nations to coerce their populations into living greener lives.