Farther Away: Essays (21 page)

We didn't say much as we drove back into the congested center of Ningbo. I looked out dully at the prolonged predusk, the ground-level objects already twilit, the sun still well up in the sky, apricot-colored, safe to stare at. With construction and traffic and commerce stretching out in all directions—everybody in China still going at it with admirable industry, if not exactly optimism—I was pierced again by the feeling I'd had on my first night in Shanghai. But what I'd wanted to describe then as
advancedness
was, I decided now, more like simple lateness: the sadness of modernity, the period of prolonged unsettling illumination before nightfall.

The puffin's maker, Ji, had grown up in Subei, not far from the Yancheng nature reserve. His parents had met as teenagers in Nanjing just before the Cultural Revolution. Like so many young city people of their generation, they'd been sent to the countryside to learn the value of labor from peasants. In Subei, they built a hut out of mud and straw, leaving slits for windows. Ji was born in 1969 and was raised by his grandparents in Nanjing for two years, but his mother missed him and brought him back to Subei. Every year, in early spring, after the family pig had been killed and eaten, the family became too hungry to do anything but lie in bed for weeks at a time, subsisting on congee, waiting for the wheat harvest.

When Ji was fourteen, he applied for one of three hundred openings at the local high school and came in at number 302 on a list of fifteen hundred applicants. Three students ahead of him were disqualified, however, and so he squeaked in. A year later, he squeaked into a better high school in Nanjing, and two years after that he squeaked into the University of Chengdu. There he was swept up in the student reform movement, marching in the street, protesting against corruption, and was fortunate—again—not to be in Beijing in June 1989, for the Tiananmen Square massacre. Like many other talented students of that time, he turned his attention from politics to business and ended up working in the toy division of a provincial import-export corporation. In 2001, he and his wife borrowed money from friends, obtained a letter of credit from Hallmark Cards, and struck out on their own. They now own four factories and employ two thousand people. Their customers include Hallmark, Gund, and Russ Berrie—the top of the market—and Ji was recently named a Model Citizen by his local government, in the category of Labor-Intensive Industry.

“I am the most lucky guy,” Ji said. He had agreed to show me around his headquarters, provided I didn't use his real name. (“Why would I want to advertise?” he said. “Whenever I want to expand, all I have to do is mention that we're the supplier for Hallmark Cards.”) His offices were situated beside a pleasant, tree-lined, concrete-bottomed river in an industrial suburb in eastern China. There was a happy bounce in Ji's step as he took me around the small production facilities he maintains there. In the last four years, most of his production has moved inland, to Anhui Province, where, he said, workers will accept substantially lower wages to be closer to their families. Ji obviously benefits financially from lower wages and lower attrition rates, but he believes that society benefits, too—that marriages are strengthened and children better cared for when the parents live close to home, and that bringing factories to rural workers is a more sustainable economic model for China than bringing rural workers to factories.

Ji showed me a robotic machine of his own design which cuts fake fur with lasers. For a small-volume item like the puffin, the fabric is cut by hand. Workers in the design department demonstrated how the pieces are machine-stitched together, with the backing side outermost, how the pointed plastic stems of the animal's eyes are pushed through the fur and cinched with washers, and how the animal is then dramatically turned inside out—dull fabric transformed into furry friend. Polyester fluff is stuffed into its head through a hole in its back, the hole sutured by hand, the seams trimmed, the fur brushed, and a Daphne's tag applied. The whole process takes an average worker about twenty minutes. Ji presented me with three finished puffins, one of them embroidered with my brother's name.

“I imagine that a panda would be a popular head cover in China,” I said idly.

“In China?” Ji laughed and shook his head. “The Chinese want maybe a bald eagle for their head cover. Or the face of George Bush.”

I was feeling a certain guilty-liberal disappointment at not having found more industrial horror upstream from my puffin. Its American seller was an animal nut and its Chinese maker a Model Citizen. Even the pollution aspect wasn't obviously terrible. A week earlier, in Nanjing, I'd visited two factories belonging to Nice Gain, an industry leader in fake fur (or, as it's known in the trade, “pile fabric”), and learned of certain advantages that synthetic fibers have over natural fibers. Nice Gain's fake fur begins as big cotton-like bales of acrylic fiber, imported from Japan, which is carded into fluffy rope and fed into computerized Jacquards that knit it into wide, strokable flows of fur. The primary raw material in acrylic fiber is petroleum—no thirsty cotton fields; no overgrazing; and a better use of oil than burning by Jeep SUVs—and the dyeing process is much cleaner with acrylics than with wool or cotton, which are contaminated with miscellaneous proteins. “If the dye coming out is dirty, we can't export the product; it means you never reached it with the dye,” Nice Gain's president, Tong Zheng, told me. Because Zheng, like Ji, was at the top of the market and could afford to run a clean operation, he bought his natural fibers precolored and didn't ask his suppliers any questions about the dyeing. (“The one thing I know,” he said, “is that if you do it to code, you're the least competitive player in the market. As a good citizen, you soon find yourself out of business.”) My puffin's fur was all acrylic, and if the acrylic-fiber plant in Japan was anything like the acrylic-fiber plant I'd seen being managed by teenagers in Cixi, there were no great environmental horrors to be found there, either. The puffin was evidently more of a luxury item than I'd known.

I asked Ji how he felt, personally, about animals, given that his business consisted of making toy images of them. The story he chose to tell was about one of the pigs his family had had when he was a boy. This pig, he said, had been skilled at burrowing holes through the mud and straw of its pen and escaping. Ji's father had finally become angry and pierced the pig's mouth with three or four iron rings; and the pig never escaped again. “Now it's a joke I have with my kids,” Ji said. “ ‘You'd better not get a ring in your nose or your belly button, because it will make me remember my pig!' ”

Nose rings are a worry because his kids are growing up in North America. Ji and his wife had always wanted to raise them in, as he put it, a “Western environment,” and the final push into a new hemisphere came two years ago, shortly after Ji was named a Model Citizen. Because of China's population policy, one thing a Model Citizen really can't do is have more than one child. Ji already had a boy from a previous marriage, and his wife had a daughter from her previous marriage. They were now expecting their first child as a couple, which would be Ji's second. One night, when his wife was six months pregnant, the two of them decided that she should go to Canada to have the baby. Their child was born in Vancouver three months later; and Ji was able to remain a Model Citizen.

There are two competing theories about the connection between economic growth and environmental protection in developing nations. One, which happens to be very convenient to business interests, holds that societies generally start worrying about the environment only after being allowed to pollute their way to middle-class wealth, leisure, and entitlement. The other theory notes that developmental maturity hasn't exactly stopped Western societies from overconsuming resources and laying waste to nature; this theory's proponents, who tend to be apocalyptic worriers, tear their hair at the thought of China, India, and Indonesia following the Western model.

Proponents of the “growth first, then environment” theory may take heart at how closely the explosion of China's GDP was followed by the emergence of Western-style nature lovers. The problem, however, is that China has so little good land and is changing so quickly. A new generation may be learning conservation, but not as fast as habitat is disappearing. Already China's national parks are being loved to death by an increasingly mobile middle class. In North America, you can still take schoolkids to a nature center one busload at a time and let them spend a day or a week watching animals. In Shanghai, where the population will soon hit twenty million, there is only one accessible nature reserve—Chongming Dongtan, on an alluvial island in the Yangtze. The reserve is well managed but heavily stressed by fishermen and upstream pollution. The entire northern third of it is engulfed by a bird-hostile invasive rice grass (according to local legend, the grass was introduced at the behest of Premier Zhou Enlai, who had asked his experts to find him a plant that could increase the size of China), and an enormous wetland park, containing a “vacation villa zone” and “wetland golf,” is under construction along the western boundary. Beginning in 2010, a system of bridges and tunnels will link the island directly to the heart of Shanghai. It will be possible to bus every kid in Shanghai to Chongming Dongtan for a day in nature; but the buses would be lined up bumper to bumper across the Yangtze.

Successful Chinese conservation efforts today tend to sidestep the populace altogether and appeal directly to the government's self-interest. In Shanghai, Yifei Zhang, the journalist-turned-WWF-staffer, is trying to get the city government to think about its maximum sustainable population and its future sources of drinking water. The city is currently planning to rely on the Yangtze estuary, but rising sea levels threaten to make it too salty to use, and Yifei is pressing the city to develop an alternative source by cleaning up the tributary Huangpu River and restoring its watershed—which, as a fringe benefit, would create new wildlife habitat. “We never despair, because we don't have high expectations,” Yifei said. Upriver from Shanghai, where hundreds of lakes have been permanently severed from the Yangtze, the WWF in 2002 set a goal of persuading the government of Hubei to reconnect just one of them. “Nobody believed it was possible,” Yifei said. “It was just a dream—a castle in the air. But we set up a demo site, and after two or three years we got the local government to try opening the sluice gates seasonally, to let the fish fry into the lake. And it worked! We were then able to give small amounts of money to local governments to set up pilot programs. We started with a goal of one lake. As of now, seventeen lakes have been reconnected.”

In Beijing I met an exceptionally effective grassroots activist named Hai-xiang Zhou. Zhou had been doing serious amateur bird photography for twenty years—he felt he'd been a national pioneer in this regard—but had come to activism only recently. In the fall of 2005, he'd heard news that avian flu had broken out near his childhood home, in Liaoning Province, and that officials were claiming the flu was spread by wild birds. Fearing an unnecessary slaughter, Zhou had taken a leave from his job and hurried to Liaoning, where he found that waterfowl and migrating cranes were dying from more ordinary causes—hunting, poisoning, starvation.

Zhou wore glasses so big that they seemed to cover half his face. “If an NGO wants to do anything here, it has to be in cooperation with the government,” he told me. “Birdwatchers and conservationists can investigate things, but to actually get anything done you have to have an angle. Local people always want more development, while the government officially wants sustainable development and protection for the environment. Since resources are very limited, officials are happy if you can help them to show that they really are doing what they're officially committed to doing. When an environmental project is done well, county leaders get a lot of positive feedback and gain a lot of face.”

On a laptop, Zhou showed me photographs of dignitaries smiling on a wildlife observation platform they'd built in his hometown. Zhou is now working on a new project at the Laotie Mountain Nature Reserve on the Liaodong Peninsula. Every fall, the entire migratory-bird population of northeast China funnels through the peninsula on its way south, and there, on public land, local poachers put up thousands of nets to capture and kill them. Most highly prized are the big raptor species, many of them endangered or threatened. A few of the birds are eaten locally, Zhou said, but most are sent to southern provinces, where they're considered a delicacy. Zhou and his daughter, a volunteer at the reserve, are collecting data to present to the central government, so that it can coordinate local policy. His photographs showed wardens chasing poachers by daylight and by headlight. They showed trees that the poachers had chopped down to block the wardens' trucks. They showed confiscated motorcycles. A room neck-deep with balled-up nets of every color—a single morning's haul by the wardens. Cages of small birds left behind as bait for bigger birds. Tree trunks lashed vertically to the tops of other trees, elevating nets to eagle height. Smaller eagle traps hung from high branches and weighted with logs. House-size nets dotted with stricken doves, white-tailed eagles, Saker falcons. Birds still alive with their wings compound-fractured, bones sticking out, the angles gruesome. A confiscated mesh laundry bag stuffed with falcons and owls, many dead, many not, all mashed together like dirty underwear. A poacher in handcuffs, wearing a nice shirt and new sneakers, his face digitally smudged. Sweat beading on the face of a warden extricating a falcon from a net. A pile of forty-seven dead hawks and eagles, each one decapitated by poachers to keep it from biting, all of them confiscated in one morning. A smaller pile of bloody heads found scattered on the ground the same morning.