Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

Mu Jingjun did not even pretend to welcome an interview. Sneering and occasionally belching as I asked apparently irritating questions about tree planting, conservation, and biodiversity, he said he had none of the answers to hand although we had faxed our request for information long in advance.

Asking for detailed figures produced an impatient sigh. He told me Heilongjiang’s forests were the greatest in China and they were growing. The government had banned logging in many areas and pledged to expand coverage to 49 percent of the province within four years. Heilongjiang was in the vanguard of the Great Green Wall project, which, along with afforestation work elsewhere in the nation, added the equivalent of 700,000 football fields’ worth of trees nationwide every year. 42

But it was hard to get a true picture of how effective the measures really are. Many foreign conservationists are skeptical about China’s claims. 43Official figures on forest cover included nurseries and shrublands. 44Less than half the land designated as “forest” actually had trees growing on it. 45Chinese academics told me privately that the forestry ministry prevented the publication of scientific papers that challenged their claims of success.

I was not sure if it was a cover-up or merely a difference of values. The forestry department had little time for ecological concerns. Biodiversity was considered an obstacle to reaping maximum economic benefit. Loggers were encouraged to cut below the canopy, remove weeds, and till the soil to prevent rival species from slowing the growth of the trees. But quantity boasts often masked quality shortcomings. Although there were more trees than thirty years earlier, there were fewer species. 46This made forests weak and vulnerable to disease. 47Nonetheless, almost every forestry official and academic I spoke to in Heilongjiang and Beijing believed man could improve on nature to ensure maximum economic returns.

The exception was former vice minister of forestry Dong Zhiyong, who told me with unusual candor that the bureaucrats running the ministry had little awareness of the need for biodiversity, even though they were in charge of most of the country’s nature reserves. The only reason they have turned to conservation, he said, was because they had no alternative: “We’re in a situation where we have no wood to cut. None of the forests are mature enough.”

The creation of many nature reserves was heavily influenced by international organizations, such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the World Wide Fund for Nature, which were allowed to send delegations to China during the period of opening that followed Mao’s death in 1976. Among the first to make contact with them was Wang Song, a zoologist by training who later went on to compile the first Red List of the country’s endangered species. 48

Now retired, Wang recalled the unease among many government officials in those early days. “Some said it was too early to work with the international community, that our conservation systems were too weak. But I said no way. We must hurry. Even then, I knew that China overused wildlife for everything, that people would kill anything for foreign currency.”

Since then, progress has been far slower than he would like. “It is a shame. We are much improved, but there is no way to change in one generation. Our country has a long history of overusing wildlife.”

Wang bemoaned the loss of forest in Heilongjiang. The plantations of small trees that replaced the old-growth forests were, he said sadly, not the same at all. “A human life is just a fraction of a second in terms of the planet’s history, but in my short time I have seen huge changes. I have clearly seen the virgin forest cleared. There are just a few small reserves left. Even now, nobody thinks about restoration of natural ecosystems.”

He was encouraged by the increasing willingness of senior officials to discuss the subject. Compared with the past, he said, China had the money for conservation. But the talk and the cash had yet to be translated into action to reverse the devastating changes to China’s ecology since the 1950s.

Wang advocates natural regeneration, letting damaged ecosystems recover by themselves. But policymakers prefer engineering projects and big reforestation schemes. With little public understanding of the importance of biodiversity, Wang feared conservation could become an empty fad: “China is very clever. We very quickly pick up foreign terms like ecotourism and eco-food. But it is mostly nonsense. Look at the Chinese papers. They always write about ‘ecological construction.’ The word construction means you can do anything you want. We tried to change it to ecological restoration, but nobody would accept this.”

When I looked out over Tangwanghe the next morning, it resembled a depressed industrial landscape more than a new national park. Coal smoke poured from hundreds of small household chimneys and a handful of industrial stacks. A shallow haze obscured distant trees. Every minute or so, a three-wheeler taxi or truck stacked with timber blundered through the otherwise quiet, white roads. Logging evidently remained the main source of income for the 40,000 residents of this frontier town, which was carved out of virgin forest in that epic year of 1958.

We crossed the road for a breakfast of gruel and baozi at a small restaurant and got talking to the owner, a middle-aged woman, whose parents moved to Tangwanghe when it opened up during the Great Leap Forward. Perhaps a little insensitively, I asked why they came to such a cold and remote place. An old man at a nearby table interrupted: “There was good money to be made here from logging up until about thirty years ago. Then we fell behind the rest of the country.” In the early days, the town had been praised by Deng Xiaoping as a model of sustainable forestry because locals planted saplings over the same area that they clear-cut. But the trade-off was unequal. The new trees, mostly white birch and larch, were a poor replacement for the old Korean pines.

The old man told me he continued to cut trees, though there were far fewer than in the past. “It only takes a few minutes with a chainsaw or half an hour by hand.”

Tangwanghe is supposed to be an example of smart top-down conservation. 49Unlike nature reserves, which are often too poorly funded to be effective in protecting flora and fauna, the national park is supposed to generate tourist income to pay for strong management. 50But the problem is that the area was chosen as a national park not because of its rich ecology but because of its collapsed economy. The nearest municipality of Yichun was classified in 2008 as one of China’s twelve “resource-depleted cities,” an evocative term that demonstrates how the unsustainable extraction of timber and other resources has left many communities without livelihoods.

The town’s young tourist chief, Ma Shengli, drove us to the Stone Forest, explaining on the way that 99.8 percent of the park was forested, albeit with mostly secondary growth. “It is just a trial project. We are pioneers. The idea is to protect the ecosystem on a large scale, develop seven tourist sites, and to help local people get rich,” he explained.

We stopped and trudged through the snowy forest, which was predominantly made up of slim young white birch and dragon spruce. There were a small number of old, broad Korean pines, though Ma explained they were usually those with gnarled trunks that were not considered good enough to cut down. It brought to mind my visit to Shangri-La, and Zhuangzi’s story of “useless trees” outlasting better-looking specimens. The park had established a sponsorship system for the fortunate if ugly survivors. For 100 yuan, visitors could have their names pinned to a protected tree, some of which were more than 400 years old.