When a Billion Chinese Jump (46 page)

But the ministry lacks a strong national network. At a regional level, environment departments continue to answer to local governments. Even more than NGOs, they are obliged to work within the system rather than to expose and oppose its faults.

The EPD’s offices were much like those of any other bureau of government throughout China. I was led along uniformly fluorescent-lit corridors past uniformly brown office doors in a uniformly orthogonal building, to the standard interview room, which was square and spacious with calligraphy and landscape paintings on one wall, large low chairs along the sides, and a well-polished table in the middle set with white-lidded cups for the green tea that arrived soon after. Bureaucratic hospitality was pleasingly not so standard, and could sometimes be rather convivial.

Li Ping, the head of Heilongjiang’s Environment Protection Department, was in good spirits—a very different mood from his most famous public appearance in November 2005 as the unfortunate official who had to admit to one of the worst pollution cover-ups in the country’s history.
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That had been, he claimed, a turning point for government accountability. An explosion at a China National Petroleum Company plant hundreds of miles upstream in Jilin Province released more than 100 times the safe level of benzene into the Songhua, one of the three rivers that flows into the Sanjiang watershed. Five people died in the blast at the factory, but it was not until more than three days later that people living along the river were told that toxins were coursing in their direction. In Harbin, officials initially announced water supplies would have to be cut off for a few days for “pipe maintenance.” The truth emerged just before the 50-kilometer poison slick hit the city, prompting a rush to the airport and railway station by those who could escape and fear and fury among those left behind. The disaster was seen as a watershed for environmentalists. Coinciding with the central government’s shift toward a new model of sustainable “Scientific Development,” the Songhua spill was cited as an example of everything that was wrong with the old way of doing things.
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It had taken similar crises in other countries to strengthen the powers
of their environmental agencies. For Japan, it was the deadly mercury poisoning incident at Minamata. In the United States, it was the publication of
Silent Spring
in 1962, when the author, Rachel Carson, revealed previously unknown consequences of pesticide on wildlife. For China in 2005, it looked for a while as if Songhua might become a similar rallying point.

For a short period, journalists enjoyed an open season. Television broadcasts and newspapers were suddenly free to criticize lax environmental regulations and the hardship of ordinary people. The media was filled with images of Harbin residents lining up with buckets and kettles in icy winter streets as they waited for water tankers usually used for road cleaning.
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For Li, brought up in a political environment where control and secrecy were the norm, the frenzy of media scrutiny was a shock. “It was a strange experience for me to have to respond to a barrage of questions. I had only seen that on TV before,” he recalled. But it was worthwhile. Li told me the media attention brought immediate budgetary rewards. Heilongjiang had been lobbying the central government for ten years for funds to clean up the Songhua. But other rivers, such as the Huai, the Liao, and the Yellow, were considered more urgent. After the benzene leak, however, the Songhua became an instant priority. Within months, Heilongjiang got everything it wanted—13 billion yuan for 116 water treatment plants and other projects to improve the river.
¹⁸

The environment protection minister, Xie Zhenhua, resigned. Nine officials at the CNPC factory were fired and others at the Jilin environmental protection bureau were punished.
¹⁹
Li insisted Heilongjiang’s government was getting tougher in implementing regulations, but its record was mixed.
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As one of China’s poorest provinces, polluting firms that would be rejected in wealthier areas were more likely to be accepted here.
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To overcome local government resistance to tighter environmental rules, Li tried to galvanize the media, another change that was supposedly helped by the Songhua spill.
²²
“This is a very big change. We want to raise public attention on these issues and to disillusion local governments who think we will protect them.”

There was some truth in this heartwarming idea that the one-party state was joining hands with an emboldened media to rein in the excesses of polluters and corrupt local governments. Nationwide, journalists have more power than in the past to expose environmental wrongdoing,
²³
and green NGOs are helping to carve out a bigger space for civil society.
²⁴
But there are limits.

As local journalists covering the Songhua spill discovered, the drawbridge was quickly raised when stories threatened stability. Local government ignored the state’s disclosure laws on pollution.
²⁵
Editors were given daily lists of topics that they were prohibited from covering. Journalists were under pressure to self-censor and to put the party before the people. Propaganda departments insisted on positive stories.
²⁶

China’s first national park ought to have been one of them. The bus journey from Harbin to the Tangwang River, a tributary of the Songhua, was six hours due north on darkening, frozen roads lined by snow-covered fields and plantations of young, thin trees in tidy rows. Replanted and patterned in this way, the Great Northern Wilderness looked neither very great nor very wild. The vastness has been conquered. The era of the ideological pioneers lives on in the names of local towns: Red Star, East Wind, and Oppose Revisionism Battalion. But nobody in the bus seemed interested in history. Those eyes that were still open were focused on the bus videos:
Die Hard,
with Bruce Willis, and
Forbidden Kingdom,
with Jackie Chan and Jet Li.

We arrived in the national park late at night. After stepping off the bus, the first vehicle we saw was a logging truck stacked high with felled trunks. “Isn’t that illegal?” asked my assistant. It certainly seemed ominous in an area where the forests were supposed to be protected.

The bus driver kindly took us an extra few hundred meters to the entrance of our hotel, so we were not outside long in the cold. Closer to Siberia now, the temperature had fallen to minus 35°C. Icicles formed on my beard. Even inside three pairs of socks, my toes became numb walking the short distance from the bus to the lobby. The receptionist apologized that there would be no hot water until the following day. Never mind. I checked in and crashed out, grateful for the warm bed.

Conservation and tyranny can make happy bedfellows. Although the concept of national parks and other protected areas is usually considered both modern and Western, the northeast of China remained untouched for centuries thanks to autocratic fiat that effectively made this region one of the world’s first and biggest nature reserves. In 1668, at the start of the Qing dynasty, Emperor Kang Xi issued a proclamation that anyone who logged, mined, hunted, or fished in the area would be decapitated.
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The Manchu ruler was motivated by a desire to protect the feng shui of his homeland.
²⁸
Kang Xi ruled during a period of rampant deforestation and land clearance elsewhere in China, but he left Manchuria in pristine condition.
It became a sanctuary for tigers, bears, leopards, wolves, wild boar, and cranes. In the eighteenth century, only a million people lived in what now comprises the three northeast provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning, a vast expanse of land covering an area the size of France and the UK combined.
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Harbin, now the biggest metropolis in the northeast, was then a small village. As late as the nineteenth century, when forest still covered 70 percent of the land, the dense woodlands were recognized as the ultimate defense for the nation’s northern borders by one military inspector: “The provinces of Jilin and Heilongjiang are full of primeval forests … Local tribes are either nomads or hunters and they seldom cut trees. The forests there extend several hundred miles without roads and therefore provide better defense than the Great Wall.”
³⁰

Political change led to the tearing down of this natural barrier and, with it, a steady erosion of the de facto wildlife reserve. When the Qing dynasty weakened in the late nineteenth century, the wilderness was opened up and then carved up by colonial powers. In 1896, during a period when Russian influence was strongest, swathes of trees were destroyed for the construction of the Trans-Siberian railway. After Japan became the dominant regional power, the forest clearance was accelerated to provide fuel and building materials for military campaigns in the 1930s and 1940s.
³¹
By the time the Chinese Communist Party took over in 1949, the northeast’s population had soared to 38 million and Heilongjiang’s forest cover had slumped to 45 percent.
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The worst was yet to come.

The Mao era saw the decimation of what was left of the Great Northern Wilderness. As early as 1956, East German experts were warning China against unsustainable clear-cutting (the complete eradication of all trees in a given area) in Heilongjiang, but they were ignored because Mao was in a hurry to catch up with the economies of the West.
³³
As we have seen repeatedly in this book, the greatest damage was done during the Great Leap Forward. In those few years, entire forests of 400-to 500-year-old Korean pines, camphor pines, and Northeast China ash were felled.

The loggers of Heilongjiang became propaganda heroes for supplying half of the nation’s timber. Their deeds were lyricized in the “Song of the Lumberjacks”:

I’m an ambitious young man from the Tiger Valley
Carrying an axe in my hand,
Chopping down trees on high mountains,
Giving my precious years to the state.

I’m an educated young man from the Tiger Valley,
A full-time lumberjack in my hilly town,
Trained with the best logging techniques,
This happy life will last 10,000 years.
³⁴

That “happy life” lasted barely twenty years. In 1984, clear-cutting was banned. By then it was too late.
³⁵
Less than 5 percent of the primary woodland was left.
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In 1998, deforestation was blamed for a series of devastating landslides across the nation. Visiting Heilongjiang that year, Premier Zhu Rongji declared, “We must never again cut down so many trees.” Logging restrictions were tightened. The state belatedly put its weight behind forest conservation.

In a one-party system, there are no alternative governments and only very weak checks on power. Unable to “kick the bums out,” the best and often only hope for reform is that power wielders die or turn over a new leaf. The Heilongjiang provincial forestry department is trying to do the latter. Formerly loggers, they are now trying to reinvent themselves as conservationists by leading the world’s most ambitious tree-planting campaign.
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On paper, this is an impressive example of poacher turning gamekeeper. In 1978, the government in Beijing announced the start of a seventy-three-year plan to rebuild the forests of northern China by planting a “Great Green Wall” that would stretch 4,480 kilometers from western Xinjiang to eastern Heilongjiang, creating the biggest man-made carbon sponge on the planet.
³⁸

The program was based around a mass mobilization of the sort that only China can muster. The National People’s Congress passed a resolution obliging every healthy Chinese citizen older than eleven to plant three to five trees each year without pay.
³⁹
In 1979, March 12 was declared National Tree-Planting Day.
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Every year since then, forestry officials nationwide have taken up shovels on that date, together with an estimated three million party members, civil servants, model workers, celebrities, and state leaders to plant saplings. The air force has also helped with aerial seeding missions.

This was tree-hugging communism at its most vivid and energetic. Watch the domestic propaganda on such days and you would think China must have the planet’s densest forests.
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That ought to be good news, but the propaganda chief of the forestry department appeared reluctant to share it with the outside world.

Mu Jingjun did not even pretend to welcome an interview. Sneering and occasionally belching as I asked apparently irritating questions about tree planting, conservation, and biodiversity, he said he had none of the answers to hand although we had faxed our request for information long in advance.

Asking for detailed figures produced an impatient sigh. He told me Heilongjiang’s forests were the greatest in China and they were growing. The government had banned logging in many areas and pledged to expand coverage to 49 percent of the province within four years. Heilongjiang was in the vanguard of the Great Green Wall project, which, along with afforestation work elsewhere in the nation, added the equivalent of 700,000 football fields’ worth of trees nationwide every year.
⁴²

But it was hard to get a true picture of how effective the measures really are. Many foreign conservationists are skeptical about China’s claims.
⁴³
Official figures on forest cover included nurseries and shrublands.
⁴⁴
Less than half the land designated as “forest” actually had trees growing on it.
⁴⁵
Chinese academics told me privately that the forestry ministry prevented the publication of scientific papers that challenged their claims of success.

I was not sure if it was a cover-up or merely a difference of values. The forestry department had little time for ecological concerns. Biodiversity was considered an obstacle to reaping maximum economic benefit. Loggers were encouraged to cut below the canopy, remove weeds, and till the soil to prevent rival species from slowing the growth of the trees. But quantity boasts often masked quality shortcomings. Although there were more trees than thirty years earlier, there were fewer species.
⁴⁶
This made forests weak and vulnerable to disease.
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Nonetheless, almost every forestry official and academic I spoke to in Heilongjiang and Beijing believed man could improve on nature to ensure maximum economic returns.