Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

15. Interview with John MacKinnon, head of the EU-China Biodiversity Programme.

16. In 2002, the State Council estimated 90 percent of the country’s grassland had some level of degradation (Richard B. Harris, Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China’s Wild West [East Gate, 2008], p. 38). Ch. 16 deals with grasslands in more detail.

17. Jane Qiu, “China: The Third Pole: Climate Change Is Coming Fast and Furious to the Tibetan Plateau,” Nature, July 24, 2008.

18. According to the Free Tibet Campaign, 900,000 have been resettled out of the overall nomadic population on the plateau of 2.25 million. The proportion of resettlements in the Qinghai portion of the plateau is far higher. (E-mail correspondence with Matt Whitticase, spokesman of Free Tibet Campaign.) Reports in Xinhua suggest a higher figure of 80 percent. http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-08/15/content_9343243.htm.

19. The quote refers to herders of Bange County, northern Tibet, who left the grassland to set up a cashmere and yak wool-carding factory in Germu City in neighboring Qinghai Province. Soon, cashmere sweaters named after the largest beautiful lake in Tibet, Namtso, went on sale in the inland market (Xinhua, “Northern Tibet Grassland Takes On New Look,” May 19, 2009).

20. “To plunder Tibet of its mineral wealth, the Chinese government first had to clear large numbers of nomads from their land where mines were to be established” (Matt Whitticase, “The End of the Nomadic Way of Life in Tibet?” Free Tibet, May 2009).

21. This is on the Chinese side alone (interview with Yao Tandong, China Academy of Sciences).

22. The proximate cause of the changes now being felt on the plateau is a rise in temperature of up to 0.3°C per decade that has been going on for fifty years—approximately three times the global warming rate (Qiu, “China: The Third Pole”).

23. Luo Yong, deputy director of China’s National Climate Center, estimates that the volume of ice on either side of the Qinghai-Tibet highway has retreated by 12 percent since the 1960s, a trend with worrying implications for the tracks. “By 2050, the safe operation of the Qinghai-Tibet railway will be affected if temperatures keep rising steadily as observed over the past decades,” Luo has warned (Chen Zhiyong, “Chilling Prediction,” China Daily, December 20, 2004). This is also backhandedly acknowledged by a Xinhua report stating the railway will not be affected by climate change for forty years (“Qinghai-Tibet Railway Won’t Be Affected by Climate Change Within the Next 40 Years at Least, Says Glaciologist,” October 3, 2009).

24. Qiu, “China: The Third Pole.”

25. Based on repeat photography study by Greenpeace of images from 1968 and 2007 (Jonathan Watts, “Everest Ice Forest Melting Due to Global Warming, Says Greenpeace,” Guardian, May 30, 2007).

26. Stephen Chen, “The Tibetan Tundra’s Explosive Secret,” South China Morning Post, October 16, 2009.

27. Harris, Wildlife Conservation in China, p. 142.

28. Though small in numbers, Tibetan rangers are more devoted to wildlife than those in other regions, probably because of their Buddhist beliefs. Interview with Xie Yan of the Wildlife Conservation Society.

29. Ibid.

30. Kate Sanders, International Campaign for Tibet, personal correspondence.

31. The “photographer” was Liu Weiqiang, who was under contract to Xinhua. This was the second such scandal. The same year—2007—the forestry bureau in Shaanxi rewarded a farmer for a photograph of a South China tiger, long feared extinct. Soon after it was published online, the hoax was spotted by attentive netizens.

32. “Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau to Embrace 6 More Railway Lines by 2020,” Xinhua, December 3, 2008.

33. Kenneth Pomeranz, “The Great Himalayan Watershed: Agrarian Crisis, Mega-Dams and the Environment,” New Left Review 58 (July/August 2009).

34. Discussed in greater detail in Ch. 3. See also Pomeranz, “Great Himalayan Watershed.”

35. Since Qinghai was linked to the network in the 1950s, the population increased at least fourfold (Harris, Wildlife Conservation in China, p. 28).

36. Xie Yu, “Graduates Offered Cash Incentive to ‘Go West,’” China Daily, January 8, 2009.

37. French, Younghusband, p. 252.

1. It came into operation in 2006, two years before the quake, and had the capacity to generate 3.4 million megawatts of hydroelectric power, enough for a small city.

2. The epicenter was just 10 kilometers away, almost a direct hit in geological terms. An expert from the Nanjing Hydraulic Research Institute told Caijing magazine that Zipingpu was designed to withstand earthquakes below level 8 on the Mercalli intensity scale; however, the Sichuan quake (known in China as the Wenchuan earthquake) on May 12, 2008, hit level 11. “It’s really a wonder that the dam survived the jolt,” he is quoted as saying (Li Hujun, “Zipingpu Dam Upstream of Chengdu Secured,” Caijing, May 19, 2008).

3. About 1,800 dams were at risk of collapse. According to China’s ministry of water resources, 69 were in danger of collapse after the earthquake, 310 were at “high risk,” and 1,424 posed a “moderate risk.”

4. As of 2008, about 67 percent of Sichuan’s energy was generated by hydropower plants (Ma Jun, “Overexploitation of Southwestern Hydropower Unhelpful to China’s Energy Conservation and Pollution Control,” Reform and Opening-up Study Series: Poverty Reduction and Sustainable Development in Western China [Social Sciences Academic Press (China), December 2008]).

5. Cited in Associated Press, “Sichuan Earthquake Damages Dams,” May 12, 2008.

6. Peter Goff and Tania Branigan, “Survivors of Quake Urged to Hang On as Troops Arrive,” Guardian, May 14, 2008.

7. The water was released at the speed of 800 cubic meters of water per second (Hujun, “Zipingpu Dam Upstream of Chengdu Secured”).

8. Shai Oster, “China: New Dam Builder for the World,” Wall Street Journal, December 28, 2007.

9. “Sichuan,” formerly known as Szechuan, means Four Rivers. This is an abbreviation of Four Circuits of the Rivers and Gorges.

10. Interview with Tang Xiyang, coauthor of A Green World Tour .

11. Steven Sage argues in Ancient Sichuan and the Unification of China (SUNY Press, 1992) that Dujiangyan was the basis for grain surpluses that gave the Qin armies a huge advantage over their rivals.

12. The landmark study on this subject in English was by Karl Wittfogel, who argued in Oriental Despotism (Vintage, 1957) that power in Asia is derived from water, creating “hydraulic states.” See also Mark Edward Lewis, The Flood Myths of Early China (SUNY Press, 2006), p. 47.

13. Li Bing was a real man, but he is often compared to the godlike emperor Da Yu, who defeated the floods by dredging rather than damming, while his son Erlang is portrayed in classical literature, such as Journey to the West, as a miraculous sage and nephew to the mythical Jade Emperor (Lewis, The Flood Myths of Early China, p. 46).

14. Where, according to an official hagiography, “many female schoolmates found him effortlessly attractive” and he excelled thanks to a “photographic memory” (Andy Zhang, Hu Jintao: Facing China’s Challenges Ahead [iUni-verse, 2002], p. 2).

15. Includes Cambodia’s 192-megawatt Kamchay Dam and the 120-megawatt Nam Ting Dam in Laos. Data from International Rivers (www.internationalrivers.org) and Probe International (www.probeinternational.org). Sinohydro has business interests scattered across China, Africa, Southeast Asia, and lately a growing number in central Asia—the state-owned company is currently working on a 150-megawatt hydropower station in Tajikistan, using part of a $200 million loan the Chinese government extended to Tajikistan’s main utilities firm, along with projects in Myanmar and Laos (Mark Godfrey, “A Global Hydro Power,” Probe International, March 6, 2009).