Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

On our last day, we picked up a hitchhiker. Yezong Zuomu was a wrinkled, weatherbeaten Tibetan pilgrim who visited Yading each year to walk around the three sacred mountains in the hope that it would bring good fortune to her family. At sixty-seven, she had never talked to a foreigner before. I needed double interpretation—the driver from her Tibetan into Mandarin, and my assistant from Mandarin into English. Her story had to be repeated again and again because of the noise of the rattling van and the language problems, but it left me with a clear picture of the harshness of life at 3,500 meters, the old spirituality of the Tibetans, and the modern lure of material development.

Yezong’s annual pilgrimage took weeks, but she carried no possessions apart from her prayer beads and a little food. The rest of the time she relied on the comfort of strangers. Every day, just before nightfall, she sought the charity of caterpillar fungus diggers, whose mountain shacks offered respite from the bitter winds that sliced across the Himalayan plains. Each dawn she set off again, chanting scriptures, fingering her prayer beads, and slowly trekking around the sacred mountain Xiannairi. The 6,032-meter peak was said to represent the closest Tibet had to a patron saint, Avalokiteshvara the Bodhisattva of Compassion. Buddhists believed a circuit of this mountain was worth chanting a hundred million scriptures.

For almost all of her life it had been thus for Yezong—living close to nature, close to the spiritual, and precariously close to starvation. Despite her poverty, such was the beauty of the landscape and the power of her belief that she, like many local people, felt she lived in Shambala, a spiritual paradise.

One of the fastest changes in world history had started to intrude. First came the new road, then the first cars. Homes were hooked up to the electricity grid. TV antennas were erected on the mountains, and the mobile phone network had expanded toward the peaks. Tourists began to appear in increasing numbers. The start of the commune’s pony-trekking business gave Yezong’s family an income for the first time in her life. Shambala had become Shangri-La. All within ten years.

It transformed her values. On her latest pilgrimage, Yezong said, she prayed as usual for a good harvest, her family’s health, and peace. But when we set her down, Yezong revealed a new set of priorities as she bid us farewell.

“I will pray for all of you because you gave me a ride,” she said. “And I will pray for more money. Money brings happiness.”

I waved good-bye, grateful for the prayer and the company, but also wondering whether Yezong realized the impact that modernity would have on her, her community, and their way of life as development advanced into the world’s formerly remote highlands. The protection of inaccessibility was disappearing. The baselines of beauty and diversity were shifting as migrants moved in and a young generation grew up unaware of the former wealth within the forests. Traditional values of sustainability were coming under new pressures. Man was crowding into almost every corner of the world. In ancient times, the poet Li Bai called the journey to the southwest “harder than the road to heaven.” For me, the climb up to the world’s roof had simply been a long, long drive. It would soon become even easier than that.

There was once a foolish old man who could not bear the sight of two mountains blocking the view outside his home. With the help of his two sons, the old man started trying to move them. Every day, they took rocks and pebbles from the slopes with the intention of dumping them in the sea far away.

This astonishing sight caught the attention of a wise man, who laughed scornfully, “You silly old fool! You are so decrepit that you can barely climb to the peak, how do you imagine you can ever shift two huge mountains?”

Undaunted, the foolish old man replied, “After I die, my sons will carry on. When they die, my grandchildren will keep up the work. My family will grow and grow and the peak will get lower and lower. Why can’t we move the mountains?”

Having put the wise man in his place, the foolish old man returned to his task, moving rocks through the hot summer and the cold winter with his sons. God was so impressed by his determination that he sent two angels down to carry away the mountains.

Every schoolchild in China is taught a version of this fable, known as Yugong Yishan or “The Foolish Old Man Who Moved the Mountains.” Written more than 400 years ago by the philosopher Li Yukou (also known as Liezi), the moral is that man can achieve anything with determination, time, and sufficient male offspring.

Mao Zedong loved the story and reinterpreted it to justify a war on nature and China’s colonial enemies. For him, the two mountains were imperialism and feudalism:

The Chinese Communist Party has long made up its mind to dig them up. We must persevere and work unceasingly, and we, too, will touch God’s heart. Our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people. If they stand up and dig together with us, why can’t these two mountains be cleared away? 2

For much of the past sixty years, the Chinese politburo has been trying to do just that. The ideological children and grandchildren of Mao are reengineering nature just as the Great Helmsman planned to build a stronger nation and liberate the population from supposedly backward traditions and foreign threats.

It required a very different way of thinking from that espoused by the philosopher dozing under a “useless tree” noted in the last chapter. But the mountain-moving mind-set has prevailed. I saw this on the Tibetan Plateau, where mankind’s ambitions were pushed to the earth’s limits.

“Aren’t we Chinese great? They said it couldn’t be done. And yet, we’ve not only done it, we’ve done it ahead of plan. No other country in the world could do this. Chinese people are so clever.”

We were two hours, several beers, and half a roasted duck into a journey along the world’s highest railway, the 1,900-kilometer line from Xining to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. But my patriotic conversation partner, Wang Qiang, was just warming up on his favorite subject: China’s engineering prowess.

“The new track follows the highway built by our soldiers in the 1950s. The terrain is so harsh that three of them died for every kilometer of road. You have to admire their spirit. But now, we’ve built the railway without the loss of a single life. Isn’t China great?”

Wang, a stout and ruddy power-plant worker from Hunan, was in the bunk two below mine. He was as keen to demonstrate the conviviality of China as he was to wax lyrical about the country’s strength. As well as cracking open a bottle of beer and sharing his food, he offered a packet of Dongfanghong cigarettes—”I smoke these because it was Mao’s favorite brand”—and travel advice about the province we were passing through. “Actually there isn’t much trouble in Qinghai. It’s full of police and soldiers, but we have very good public order.”

Wang was one of about sixty passengers squeezed into a “hard sleeper” carriage as our overnight train rattled toward the sunset, passing a half-visible rainbow, the world’s largest saltwater lake, hillsides quilted with yellow rapeseed and the occasional white Tibetan yurt.

With a couple of hours left until lights out, my fellow travelers were looking for ways to kill time and forget the cramped and smoky conditions of our shared compartment. Some played cards, others sang with their children, a curious few chatted with a Tibetan monk. And when that entertainment ran out, several attempted to talk to me, the only Western face in the carriage.