Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

1. At the time, the population of China had just passed 900 million. Today, it is close to 1.4 billion.

2. There are at least two other equally apocalyptic versions of this story that suggest the consequence of the synchronized jump would be a tsunami or an earthquake that would kill everyone on the planet. All of them may be bastardizations of the apocryphal quote attributed to Napoleon: “Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world.”

3. Wei Yiming et al., China Energy Report (2008): CO 2 Emissions Research (Science Press, 2008). The U.S. Energy Information Administration and the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center noted an increase of more than 30 percent between 2003 and 2005.

1. Found at Ana village, Chuxiong Prefecture (Xu Jianchu and Jesse Ribot, “Decentralisation and Accountability in Forest Management: A Case from Yunnan, Southwest China.” European Journal of Development Research 16, 1 [spring 2004]).

2. Chen paid the local authorities to clear up the mess, but neither he nor they bothered about the consequences until Chinese journalists revealed that the great director had turned the lake into a dump site. He was fined 90,000 yuan and publicly apologized for his negligence. Local officials were reprimanded, the lake was cleaned up and, two years later, the government banned filmmaking and artistic performances in most nature reserves.

3. Rock’s influence may be overstated. Hilton said he studied the essays of the French missionary Abbé Évariste-Régis Huc, whose version of the myth of Shambala located it somewhere north of the Kunlun mountain range between Altai and Tian Shan. This would put it close to the border between current-day Qinghai and Xinjiang, hundreds of miles from Yunnan. But that has not stopped many other areas from attempting to appropriate the lucrative name (Michael McRae, The Siege of Shangri-La: The Quest for Tibet’s Legendary Hidden Paradise [Broadway Books, 2002], pp. 84–86).

4. Renamed Camp David by President Eisenhower in 1955.

5. Ashild Kolas, Tourism and Tibetan Culture in Transition: A Place Called Shangri-La (Routledge, 2007).

6. That year, an earthquake struck the area, killing two hundred people and putting the city’s unique architectural heritage into the international spotlight. Soon after, Lijiang was granted UNESCO World Heritage status.

7. The trend is provincewide. In 2007, Yunnan province received 4.6 million overseas tourists and 89.9 million domestic tourists (China National Bureau of Statistics).

8. Kolas, Tourism and Tibetan Culture, details how the Diqing government’s tourist office lobbied for the renaming of Zhongdian in late 1996 by inviting a “search party” commissioned by the Yunnan Economy and Technology Research Center to find evidence backing their claims. The party comprised more than forty academics, including experts in the fields of ethnology, literature, religion, linguistics, geography, and Tibetology. The government persuaded the Diqing Prefecture Tibetan Studies Center to assert that Xianggelila (Shangri-La) was a transliteration of sems kyi nyima zlawa (sun and moon of the heart)—a phrase in the local dialect used as a metaphor for perfection in the Bon culture.

9. Logging would probably have been halted anyway because the state banned tree felling in many areas after the floods of 1998 were blamed on deforestation.

10. A year after Xianggelila was renamed, labor teams began construction of a new airport and the tourists surged in. Between 1995 and 2010, the number of visitors increased 400-fold to three million, according to Zhongdian tourist authorities. (Interview with the head of the Zhongdian tourist board.)

11. This view was best expressed by Ye Xiaowen, the head of China Administration of Religious Affairs, who pointed out that central government spending was raising living standards more than the dreamy romanticism of the West. He concluded: “Life expectancy was 35.5 years, but now it has reached 67 years. This is the real ‘Shangri-La’” (Ye Xiaowen, “Shangri-La Has Changed and Tibetans Know It,” China Daily, December 8, 2008).

12. He was later jailed for his idealism. This is discussed in more detail in ch. 16.

13. Yu’s ideas are outlined in more detail in ch. 13.

14. Elizabeth Economy, The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China’s Future (Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. 30–31.

15. Sam Crane provided this definition of ziran , which includes a translation by David Hinton. A far more recent variation is daziran —or “big ziran ”—which is often used in a similar way to the Western idea of “Mother Nature,” according to the China hand Sidney Rittenberg. The concepts of tian and ziran are fundamental to early philosophical debate in China.

16. Zhuangzi tells the story of a lost paradise as follows:

I have also heard that in ancient times when beasts outnumbered men, people had to build their dwellings in trees in order to avoid them. By day, they would pick acorns and chestnuts; at night they would sleep in the trees. Hence, they were called the “nest people,” meaning people living in the nests. In ancient times, people did not know the use of clothes as they collected firewood in summer and burnt it in winter to keep themselves warm. Hence, they were referred to as “people who knew how to survive.” During Shennong’s reign, people went to bed with a peaceful mind and got up free and easy. They did not know their fathers but only knew their mothers. Living side by side with elk and deer, they farmed and wove for themselves and nursed no ill will against others. This was an age when virtue reached its peak.

Thereafter, the Yellow Emperor ruined virtue by his fights with Chiuyou in Zhuolu, with blood flowing a hundred li. When King Shun and King Yao ascended the throne, numerous official posts were established. King Tang exiled his lord and King Wu destroyed the preceding dynasty. Ever since then, the strong have been bullying the weak; the many have become the prey to the few. Ever since King Tang and King Wu, all monarchs have been usurpers who bring disorder to the people (Zhuangzi, trans. Wang Rongpei, Library of Chinese Classics, vol. 2 [Hunan People’s Publishing House, 1999], ch. 29, pp. 517–19).

17. The ideal baseline was called the “fundamental norm.” Mankind followed the concept of wuwei (noninterference by human intelligence) so everything was done in the interests of creation and the constancy of nature.

18. Cited in Roger Ames, The Art of Rulership: A Study of Ancient Chinese Political Thought (University of Hawaii Press, 1983), pp. 201–2.

19. Liu is also commonly credited as the originator of tai chi and soy milk.

20. Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (Social Science, 2000), p. 157.

21. Activism was frowned upon, except by the Chimei (lit. “Red Eyebrows”), a contemporary agrarian rebel group sometimes described as the forerunner of secret societies and underworld gangs such as the Triads.

22. Mark Elvin, Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (Yale University Press, 2004).

23. Ibid., p. 9.

24. Interview with John MacKinnon, head of the EU-China Biodiversity Programme and one of the most experienced foreign zoologists working in China.

25. Yuming Yang, Kun Tian, Jiming Hao, Shengji Pei, and Yongxing Yang, “Bio-diversity and Biodiversity Conservation in Yunnan, China,” Biodiversity and Conservation 13, 4 (2004): 813–26.