Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

Ma told me there were bears, boar, foxes, and deer deeper in the forest, though I saw no trace of them. The absence of any animal tracks was perhaps unsurprising in the depths of winter, but, apart from a few small birds, the forest was eerily quiet.

Short of wildlife, the park’s managers decided their best selling point was unusual granite formations. The building-sized geological formations were unlikely to ever challenge the majesty of the Grand Canyon, but their poetic names were in keeping with a long Chinese tradition of using the imagination to amplify nature. Wandering around the “Kissing Boulders,” “Sliver of Sky,” “Drunken Tortoise,” and “Pine Teasing Golden Toad” made for a pleasant walk, and the views from the hilltops, even of secondary forest, were breathtaking.

But under the forest canopies, the variety of life was diminishing. John MacKinnon, the head of the EU-China Biodiversity Programme, told me China plants more trees than the rest of the world combined. “But the trouble is they tend to be monoculture plantations. They are not places where birds want to live.” The World Bank advised China to concentrate more on quality than quantity of its forests.

China’s woodlands have been emptied by decades of overhunting, foliage cutting, and excess harvesting of wild plants and fungi. 51The protection of the military and the powers of the one-party state have not been applied with enough gusto to prevent a decimation of many species.

At the top of the food chain, the world’s biggest tiger, the Amur tiger, also known as the Siberian or North China tiger, had been hunted close to extinction because of its value in traditional Chinese medicine. 52Lower down, the Heilongjiang frog and Northeast China frog were also on the verge of being wiped out because their estrogen is a traditional treatment for fatigue, improving the memory, and strengthening the kidney. 53The Great Northern Wilderness was becoming the land of dead rivers and hollow forests.

Changbaishan was perhaps the most notorious example. This forest in Jilin, on the border with North Korea, was once one of the most bio-rich places in northern China, home to over fifty species of mammals, including the Amur tiger, sika deer, goral, sable, and black bear, as well as 200 species of birds. This was the subject of one of China’s first and most influential studies of the economic value of an ecosystem. 54International recognition came in 1980, when UNESCO named Changbaishan as a world’s biosphere reserve with a declared ecological inventory of 2,277 plants and 1,225 animal species.

The UN body appears to have been the victim of environmental fraud. In 2008, local biologists said they had been ordered to exaggerate wildlife numbers because the real figures were so low they would hurt the image of the nature reserve. 55Visiting scientists found almost no animal tracks in the park. Feng Yongfeng, one of China’s most influential environmental reporters, put it more succinctly: Changbaishan, he told me, is an “empty forest.”

The following day, we penetrated deeper into Xiaoxingan to visit a logging camp outside the national park. It was a two-hour drive by bus and then car along a rutted, icy road. The forests were full of felled trees, timber yards lined the roadside, logging trucks added to the traffic, and most of the people we met were cutting, trading, or processing wood. On the bus, a timber merchant offered to show us around. I was grateful for her kindness, but it turned out she had ulterior motives. After calling her husband to explain she would be late home because of a foreign guest, the pretty middle-aged woman hooked up with a young boyfriend. They got friendly in the back of the car as we drove from lumberyard to tree farm.

Finding the lumberjacks was not easy. We stopped every few hundred meters to listen for the buzz of a chain saw, but by the time we caught up with the loggers they had already felled the day’s quota of trees and were loading them onto a truck as the snow fell around them. Four men were needed to carry a single trunk of white birch. They lifted in pairs, two at the front, two at the rear, poles across their shoulders tied to steel hooks that bit into the logs as they walked up a pair of parallel planks to the top of the truck.

Their leader, Hou Zhengkuan, gave directions and adjusted loads to ensure the truck was stable. Between logs, he told me incomes had fallen along with production over the previous five years. Now that it was forbidden to fell Korean pines, earnings came almost entirely from the low-quality white birch, which was used for pulp, ice-cream sticks, firewood, matches, plywood, and furniture. He earned 1,800 yuan a month. This was a decline from five years earlier when he was cutting higher-value timber. “The forests are declining in volume. There is less and less wood,” he said.

It is the same everywhere in China. Now that the Korean pine has been decimated, most of the trees in the forest are Dahurian larch, which reaches maturity after a hundred years, and fast-growing white birch, which mature in just forty years. 56But even these species have been logged close to unsustainable levels.

Hou shrugged at the way things had turned out. “After fifty years of cutting, the forests have declined.” Loggers, he said, chopped 95 percent less wood than when he started. We next went to see the ultimate diminution of the forests: a small, mist-shrouded factory where huge tree trunks were splintered into 5-centimeter toothpicks. The process was primitively simple. At one end of the workshop, thick logs were peeled. At the other they were diced into thin strips. The transformation was completed along the length of a conveyor belt. The belt was only five meters or so long, but the air was so thick with humidity I could not see one end from the other.

Moisture was the key to the process. The birch had to be thoroughly soaked before it could be stripped and sliced. It was then wrung like a wet rag, filling the air with droplets and turning the factory into a cool sauna.

In the mist, laborers appeared and disappeared like wraiths as they fetched fresh logs, hewed off the bark, then pierced either end of the bare wood with spikes ready for the machine.

Swollen with water, the logs were easily peeled by automated blades, then pressed flat and squeezed dry by a thunderously juddering mangle. Dozens of rings, each representing a year of growth, were unraveled in seconds. A tree was consumed every five minutes.

The clanking machine is like a calculator, doing addition and multiplication for mankind but only subtraction and division for the natural environment. Output—production and profits—are positive. The owner drives a luxury car. Billions of teeth around the world have been picked with the carefully crafted splinters he produces. The input, on the other hand, is entirely negative. Over twenty years, the two workshops in this factory have shredded close to a million trees.

And this is just one tiny old factory that employs a couple of dozen people and cheap, outdated equipment. Multiply that by several thousand and a picture emerges of how much wood is being consumed by China’s paper mills, flooring firms, furniture workshops, construction companies, and chopstick makers. 57Consumption of printing and writing paper have more than doubled since 1995. Hardwood floorings are increasingly popular. China has become the biggest user of pulp and timber in the world. No wonder the factory manager was finding wood harder to come by and more expensive.

The higher prices were inevitable because the government’s toughness applied only to suppliers. When it came to consumers, the authoritarian tiger turned into a pussycat. Despite the 1998 logging ban, wood consumption continued to surge along with the growing economy. With China’s forests unable to meet demand, buyers had to look to other nations for supplies. From Heilongjiang they did not have to go far.