Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

26. Forest cover in the province more than halved between 1950 and 1990. The worst logging occurred in Xishuangbanna, where 530,000 hectares were cleared between 1947 and 1980—much of it to cure tobacco (Qu Geping and Li Jinchang, Population and the Environment in China [Lynne Rienner, 1994], p. 64).

27. Yang et al., “Biodiversity and Biodiversity Conservation in Yunnan,” p. 10.

28. As rubber prices have tripled over the past decade, plantations have boomed in Xishuangbanna. Now covering about 400,000 hectares, they occupy 20 percent of the prefecture’s land. Nowhere is safe. China’s leading conservation center, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, home to 11,700 plant species, is threatened by the spread of rubber trees (Jane Qiu, “China’s Leading Conservation Center Is Facing Down an Onslaught of Rubber Plantations,” Nature, January 8, 2009).

29. Personal correspondence and Robert Moseley, “Historical Landscape Change in Northwestern Yunnan, China: Using Repeat Photography to Assess the Perceptions and Realities of Biodiversity Loss,” Mountain Research and Development 26, 3 (August 2006): 214–19.

30. Yang et al., “Biodiversity and Biodiversity Conservation in Yunnan,” p. 4.

31. Jianchu Xu, a professor at the Kunming Institute of Botany, and Jesse C. Ribot, a senior associate at the Institutions and Governance Program, World Resources Institute in Washington, agree with Moseley that local autonomy is the best way to protect forest resources and that locals know best how to protect their environments. In ancient times, there were even elections for forest guardians, who risked being replaced if they were not “fair, straight, honest and moral” (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]).

32. Tibetan monks at the Taizi monastery blame themselves for the dramatic retreat of the Mingyong glacier because they feel the sacred mountain’s decline reflects a lack of pious devotion on their part (B. B. Baker and R. K. Moseley, “Advancing Treeline and Retreating Glaciers: Implications for Conservation in Yunnan, PR China,” Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research 39, 2 [2007]: 200–209).

33. Yang et al., “Biodiversity and Biodiversity Conservation in Yunnan,” p. 5.

34. Matsutake exports to Japan have made many farmers rich. The business generates more export income for Yunnan than any other agricultural product. In 2005, the province earned $44 million from Matsutake—almost half of which came from Shangri-La (Christoph Kleinn, Yang Yongping, Horst Weyerhäuser, and Marco Stark, The Sustainable Harvest of Non-Timber Forest Products in China: Strategies to Balance Economic Benefits and Biodiversity Conservation [Sino-German Center for Research Promotion, 2006]). Studies have shown that production of Matsutake declined from 530 metric tons in 1995 to 272 in 2000. There has been a small improvement since, thanks to the education of villagers and a local initiative to regulate harvesting (ibid.).

35. The price has reached $60,000 per kilogram (Richard Stone, “Last Stand for the Body Snatcher of the Himalayas?” Science, November 21, 2008).

36. These brown worm-shaped organisms account for four out of every ten dollars earned by rural Tibetans and provide a bigger boost for the economy than the combined revenue from manufacturing and mining (Daniel Winkler, “Yartsa Gunbu [ Cordyceps sinensis ] and the Fungal Commodification of the Rural Economy in Tibet AR,” Economic Botany 62, 3 [2008]: 291–305).

37. In July 2007, eight people were shot to death and fifty wounded in one such battle. In desperation, people are foraging for the treasured fruit in ever more extreme locations. In June 2007, dozens of pickers died after being stranded in a blizzard. Every year, the fungus is being driven higher as the fragile lower grasslands are trampled into desert by the growing hordes of harvesters (Stone, “Last Stand”).

38. A cascade of dams on the Lancang (Mekong), including the world’s tall-est—the 272-meter Xiaowan Dam—were already under construction. Thirteen more were being built or planned on the Nu (Salween) and eight on the Jinsha—the headwater of the Yangtze. Ch. 3 describes some of the consequences.

39. The impact could be felt hundreds of miles away. China’s dams were already slashing catches downstream in Cambodia, where people depended on fish for the majority of their protein. For more on hydropower, see Ch. 3.

1. Francis E. Younghusband, Among the Celestials (Elibron Classics, 2005 [first published 1898], p. 87).

2. Mao Zedong’s closing speech at the Seventh National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 1945.

3. Patrick French, Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer (Harper-Collins, 1994), p. 223, quotes a letter from Lieutenant Hadow, commander of the Maxim gun detachment, in which he writes to his father: “I hope I shall never have to shoot down men walking away again.”

4. Ibid., p. 283.

5. Younghusband, Among the Celestials, pp. 15, 246, 254.

6. Tenzin Metok Sither, a spokeswoman for the overseas-based Free Tibet Campaign, told me it would add to the already tense political situation. “This is a highly strategic project that seeks to tighten Beijing’s control over Tibet and will serve to further marginalize Tibetans economically and culturally.”

7. On December 9, 1973, Mao informed King Birendra of Nepal that China was going to build the railway. In March 1974, construction on the XiningGolmud section, which had begun in 1960, was resumed. See “The Qinghai-Tibet Railway: 50 Years in the Making,” July 7, 2006, www.china.org.cn/english/features/Tibet/174015.htm.

8. Paul Theroux, Riding the Iron Rooster (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1988).

9. Caroline Williams, “Where’s the Remotest Place on Earth?” New Scientist, April 20, 2009. (According to Williams, it is three weeks’ journey from Lhasa.)

10. www.dalailama.com/messages/world-peace/a-human-approach-to-peace.

11. Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel (Cosimo, 2006 [first published 1889]).

12. In an e-mail to the author, Tibetan researcher Tenzin Losel wrote: “Tibet was never a Shangri-La pre-1959, and nor were other places in the world at that time (or today). We Tibetans would never describe it as such. But at the same time we Tibetans firmly deny the ‘truth’ stated by the Chinese government that old Tibet was the darkest, the most backward and the most barbaric society. Serfs did exist in the history of Tibet, but not the kind of serfs described by the Chinese government who did not enjoy any rights and who were merely treated as animals that can speak. The reality was more a contract-based relationship between serfs and their owners.”

13. Since 1965, the central government claims it has financially supported Tibet to the tune of about 97 billion yuan ($14 billion). In the five years up to 2007, the incomes of farmers and herdsmen rose 83 percent. But the government insists that, far from being overrun by Han settlers, nine out of every ten residents are Tibetan. The environmental situation is also supposedly improving thanks to restrictions on logging and a ban on the mining of mercury, arsenic, peat, and alluvial gold. Over the coming decades, Beijing promises 22 billion yuan in investment on 160 “blue-sky” environment projects (Ye Xiaowen, “Shangri-La Has Changed and Tibetans Know It,” China Daily, December 8, 2008).

14. According to China, this was voluntary. According to the Tibetan government in exile, it was imposed by military force.