Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

A few years ago that would have seemed an absurd, or at least ideologically incorrect, question. Back then, China’s opaque, old-fashioned communist dictatorship seemed to be mirrored in the country’s dirty and polluted industrial structure. But views had changed dramatically. Following President Hu Jintao’s Scientific Outlook on Development, the government claimed to have made environmental sustainability a priority. It was not just a slogan.

The red government appeared to be turning greener by the day. Its Eleventh Five-Year Plan, for the 2006–10 period, was the most environmentally ambitious document in the history of the Communist Party. It promised to reduce pollution by 10 percent, improve energy efficiency by 20 percent, and raise the share of renewables in the energy mix to 15 percent. During that period China announced its first climate-change white paper and Beijing introduced tighter car-emission standards than those of the U.S. Cadres and government officials were told their promotion prospects would depend on meeting environmental targets as well as economic-growth goals. Pilot programs were launched for the introduction of a “green GDP,” which would add long-term ecological factors into economic calculations. Beijing introduced draconian traffic control and factory relocation schemes to clear its filthy air in time for the “Green Olympics.” National lawmakers passed a bill that obliged local authorities to release pollution information to the public. It looked as though the full powers of the one-party state were being mobilized to create a more transparent and cleaner society. The ideological icing on the cake came when Hu Jintao made the creation of an “eco-civilization” a pillar of party policy.

International opinion was slow to keep up. For years, China’s pollution had been derided along with its politics. But suddenly the pendulum of international opinion swung to the other extreme. Prominent foreign commentators began to laud the virtues of authoritarianism. China’s ability to get things done for the environment was compared favorably against wishy-washy Western democracies that had to buy off voters with ever greater promises of consumption. In the United States, three-times Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist Thomas Friedman enviously proclaimed, “If only we could be like China for a day.” 2In a New York Times op-ed, he opined that America-style democracy was inferior when it came to making tough choices on climate change:

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the twenty-first century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. 3

It is perhaps a measure of the environmental crisis facing humanity and the gains made by China that such an influential liberal was willing to consider dictatorship as, at least, a partial solution.

Heilongjiang provided, at least on first sight, further evidence for this claim. This is a key location for the biggest “greening” campaign on the planet, which has in recent years planted more trees than the rest of the world combined. It is where the world’s biggest army has been mobilized to help protect endangered species such as the Amur tiger. Here too, the one-party state has banned logging and tried to put local and individual interests aside by designating huge expanses of land as nature reserves. And it was in Heilongjiang that a new model of nonconfrontational environmental activism achieved its earliest successes.

Ma Zhong was just fifteen years old when he was dispatched to guard and conquer the Great Northern Wilderness, an expanse of wetlands, dense virgin forest, and freezing winter temperatures that plunged below minus 40°C. 4The challenge was daunting. Humanity had shunned these lands for millennia. The swamps, impenetrably marshy in summer and ice hard during the long dark winter, were deemed almost uninhabitable.

But a harsh landscape and unfamiliar traditions were by no means the biggest challenges confronting Ma at this moment in history. The year was 1969. For three years, his home city of Beijing had been racked by the Cultural Revolution, which pitted student Red Guards against the army, the party, their parents, and each other. On the northern border, skirmishes between Chinese and Soviet troops threatened to escalate into all-out war. Mao Zedong’s solution was to disperse the Red Guards and send millions of students out of the cities and into remote frontier areas to strengthen China’s borders and increase food production by converting land to agricultural usage. 5

Ma was the youngest of a battalion of about 100 “educated youth” from Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Harbin who were sent to Fuyuan County to convert marshland to farm fields on China’s northeastern border with Siberia. The urban teenager suddenly found himself living in one of the world’s most desolate landscapes.

The Sanjiang wetlands covered an area the size of Ireland, yet they were home to a tiny indigenous population of just 4,000. Most were Hezhe, the smallest of China’s ethnic minorities, a nomadic, shamanistic culture in which the men hunted by sled and the women wore salmon-skin robes threaded together with animal tendons.

“I have never seen such a wild place before or since in the whole world,” Ma said forty years later, his eyes lighting up as he recalled the wonder of that time. “It was a unique experience. I was so alone that I could touch nature. I could talk to the forest and the wetland. I learned to hunt and to fish. You didn’t need any skill. The fish were so abundant that all I had to do was put the rod in the water to catch something.”

When life started to return to something like normal in 1974, Ma went back to Beijing a changed man. 6He was still determined to master the wilderness, but this time with research rather than labor. When the universities reopened, he committed himself to a study of agriculture. It was not until 1988 that he returned to Fuyuan for a reunion with his fellow pioneers. The intervening fourteen years had seen the death of Mao and the start of the opening-and-reform policy that brought foreign capital and modern technology into an increasingly market-oriented nation. The impact was evident everywhere. When Ma returned to his beloved wetlands, he was shocked. The transformation he had helped begin with old tractors and a band of puny students was superaccelerated with the support of the World Bank, Japanese engineers, and state-of-the-art drainage and channeling machinery.

The consequences appalled him: “Everything had totally changed. The islands of pristine forest in the wetland were clear-cut. There were no fish left in the river. All the other animals were gone,” he sighed. “I was very sad. I knew I had started this process. But back then, we were just struggling to survive. We disturbed nature, but only a little. Because there were so few of us, we couldn’t do that much damage. We tried to convert the wetland, but we hadn’t been able to do it. But when I returned the wetland had been turned into dry land for farming. It gave me a weird feeling.”

Ma was forced into a bout of self-questioning. He changed direction. A rising star in academia, he switched his field of postgraduate study from agriculture to the environment. The Sanjiang wetlands became the focus of his research and his political activism. Once again, he was a pioneer, this time as a conservationist.

He quickly moved to the forefront of a new generation of idealists, this time devoted to the environment rather than politics. Ma was influential because he campaigned in a very Chinese way. He knew the one-party system, so did not attempt to confront it, working instead on persuasion and enlightened self-interest. He knew that, post-Mao, the nation was sick of ideology, so instead of appealing to vague ideals he focused on the economic, scientific argument for preservation. He knew the government structure was fragmented and competitive, so he built alliances where he could rather than trying to win over everyone. And he knew that in the New China, money talked, and dollars spoke loudest, so he drummed up financial support from overseas.