Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

In places the plains had surrendered to sandy dunes. Elsewhere, defensible areas were bolstered with lines of trees and shrubs. Mostly, though, the surface was low grass, gravel, or scrub, hence the generic name gobi, which means “stony desert” in Mongolian. 6Despite fears of sand encroachment on cities and farms, the gravel was more mobile and often more of a threat to habitation. 7Inappropriate human activity often paved its way. As I had seen in Shandong, Gansu, Xinjiang, and Heilongjiang, overgrazing, overfarming, overpopulation, and misuse of water resources had taken their toll.

If tended well or left completely alone, grass will protect the soil. But beyond a certain point, overused grassland degrades irreparably, and soil becomes as much a nonrenewable resource as oil. 8Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute considers this one of the greatest environmental problems facing the world, far bigger than the dust bowls that devastated the wheat production of the United States in the 1930s. He fears that China faces a calamitous loss of arable land in Inner Mongolia and other northern regions that will lead, at best, to rising global food prices and tensions and, at worst, famine, instability, and war. 9This is not only a problem for food security. The world’s peaty grasslands contain huge amounts of greenhouse gas. If they deteriorate and these gases are released, the effect on the climate could be catastrophic.

In 2002, the State Council warned that 90 percent of China’s usable natural grassland had suffered some level of degradation. 10A huge greening campaign was set in motion in an attempt to repair the damage. Depending on the area, it combined elements of the “Great Green Wall” tree planting I had seen in Heilongjiang, the “grants for green” incentives for farmers to cease cultivation I had admired in Gansu, and the mass resettlement of nomads I had witnessed on the Tibetan Plateau. But government money and mass mobilizations tend to deal with the consequences rather than the usual cause: excessive economic exploitation of areas ill-fitted to agriculture and industry. This was recognized more clearly at the grass roots, where the budding NGO movement started to advocate a different approach.

Among those most familiar with Inner Mongolia was Chen Jiqun, who worked with communities of former nomads who had been resettled into concrete houses on the steppe. Having spent more than thirty years in the area, he told me the problem of land degradation was ultimately one of culture. 11“China’s production system has totally destroyed the northern grasslands and lifestyle. The Han just don’t understand the steppe. We should stop sending people into the wilderness. We are not just destroying our own ecology, we are damaging others.”

An artist by training, Chen moved to Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution. The situation for students who “went down to the countryside” here was different from those who went to Heilongjiang or Xinjiang. In Inner Mongolia the political violence was bloodier while the war against nature was relatively subdued, at least in terms of land reclamation. 12Between purges and factional fighting, Chen spent long enough among herders to develop a lasting respect for their understanding of the grasslands.

He believed modern efforts to resettle them were misguided. By taking the nomads off the prairies both here and in Tibet, the government aimed to ease overgrazing. But instead of moving seasonally and relatively lightly across the land, the herders’ flocks were now penned in smaller, fixed areas that they quickly chewed into dust. The grass could not recover, so the flocks moved on to destroy other areas.

Alarmed about the impact on milk, beef, mutton, and cashmere, scientists from Beijing were asked to restore the productivity of the grassland. Among their solutions was to douse the prairie with rodenticide in the mistaken belief that the slaughter of pika, rabbits, and rats would leave more nutrients for the cows and sheep. But the rodents were vital to the ecosystem. By burrowing into the earth they made the grassland moister and healthier. 13When they disappeared, so did many other animals, such as snakes and birds, higher up the food chain. The rodent-control officials belatedly learned that biodiversity was not a luxury but a vital element to sustainable productivity. 14

Many grassland plant species were in decline. 15More land was being given over to monocultures of wheat, corn, and grain, but they did not naturally produce more food without massive inputs of fertilizer and diverted water. 16Nor were cows and sheep fattening up as they once did. 17Such problems were sometimes blamed on climate change, but it was clearly not the only reason. Just across the border in Mongolia there had long been far better protection of biodiversity of both plants and animals (though in recent years, it too was suffering as a result of the demand from China and other countries for land, minerals, and ingredients for traditional medicine).

Chen focused his efforts on education, but this was not easy in such a sparsely populated expanse. In Wuzhumuqin County, there was just one elementary school for an area twice the size of Switzerland. Using his fine-art training, in 2008, Chen illustrated a book that encouraged the 300,000 former nomads to assert their legal rights over the land. It told the story of Qiqige, a young Mongolian girl who dreamed of a lost idyll of beautiful open scenery, rich wildlife, and horseback rides, then woke up and looked out of her window on a degraded, polluted land divided up into barbed-wire pens for cashmere herds. The book’s message was reinforced by a copy of the relevant laws and regulations printed in Chinese and Mongolian that reminded herders of their rights to use the land. Local authorities were so worried by these materials that they ordered police to seize copies and threaten locals who distributed them with arrest.

Chen has always tried to keep the law on his side, turning to the courts when necessary. In 2006, he helped a nomad community to mount a legal challenge against the East Wuzhumuqin Paper Mill, a polluter that had been relocated to Inner Mongolia after an earlier “cleanup” at its original location in Hebei. The nomads won compensation, and the factory was moved on, although the land it had contaminated remained a blight on the area.

Though small in scale, such victories were encouraging. The space for civil society was growing, particularly with regard to environmental issues. Premier Wen Jiabao recognized the need for NGOs and journalists to expose violations of regulations that might otherwise be covered up by local authorities. Pan Yue, the deputy environment minister, championed their cause, noting that the public were the “biggest stakeholders in the environment.” The number of NGOs surged. 18Major international conservation groups established operations in China. Foreign funds provided seed money to domestic groups.

In Inner Mongolia, Chen worked with nomads, Korean charities, and China’s oldest legal environmental NGO, Friends of Nature. 19Its cofounder Liang Congjie, a professor at the Academy of Chinese Culture, was inspired to work on the grassland issues after seeing Chen’s Echoing Steppe website of drawings and photographs of a disappearing lifestyle and ecosystem. Liang had built a reputation as the “soul of China’s green movement” after establishing Friends of Nature in 1994. 20Like many of the other groups that followed, it became an outlet for social activists who were unable to press for political changes in the wake of the Tiananmen Square crackdown five years earlier. 21His message was essentially one of thrift: everyone in China needed to use resources more wisely. People were listening, though not yet in the numbers needed to make a difference.