When a Billion Chinese Jump (32 page)

Gansu and Ningxia

No matter how hard mankind tries to transform nature, the largest
plots of cultivated land are often overtaken by the elements: the wind
and the sand which turns them into dunes, neither arable nor edible.
—Ma Jun, author and conservationist
¹

Flying into Gansu was like landing on the moon. The plane descended through a rugged corridor of barren, gray-brown mounds that swelled up on either side and stretched away into the horizon. Bereft of trees and water, the corrugated landscape looked utterly desolate. Inside the hills, there was no sign of human activity. The earth seemed too dry to support life.

Overcultivation had left mountains naked. Mines, factories, and farms had drained streams and fouled rivers. Many wells no longer held water. Sand dunes threatened farm fields.

The same was true of much of the country.
²
The droughts were getting worse. The shortage of water in northern China was the most pressing environmental problem facing the country and it prompted some of the most desperate remedies. Man had been fighting a battle against the desert here for centuries. Now, thanks to a squandering of resources, dire pollution, and climate change, humanity was in retreat on several fronts.

Guo Yuchun and Wei Guohu were the last to abandon their village at the foot of the Great Wall. They did not want to leave. Although the river
that irrigated their crops had dried to a trickle and the dust storms were growing fiercer, they preferred their ancestral home to the new house provided under a government resettlement program. Living with scarcely any water was tough, but so were the old couple, who during their long lives had survived many deadly droughts and famines. But, in the end, even they joined the exodus, though not because of the elements.

“It got too lonely,” Wei told me with a broad smile that he seemed to save for his saddest comments.

Wei was eighty-four years old. He sported chunky, round dark glasses of a sort popular among old men in northwestern China and stroked a long, wispy beard that made him look like the guru in a kung fu movie. He was not used to visitors. They were few and far between in Jintai, a remote county on the provincial border between Gansu and Ningxia. This area is so dry that many villagers padlock their wells, even though they leave the doors to their homes open.

Wei and his wife had left their village the previous month. The couple’s new home had been hard to find. We had driven for three hours through some of the bleakest scenery in China to reach it. The area was almost devoid of human life. Over a 50-kilometer stretch I saw a single mining truck, an old brick kiln, three tethered asses, the dust of a nomad riding his horse up a distant mountain track, and, surreally, two workers in fluorescent orange jackets sweeping an empty road with straw brooms.

Even after reaching Wei’s village we struggled to follow the directions to his home. The hard brown land of gravel, loess, and sand lacked obvious features by which to navigate.

After going around in circles for a while, we reached a cluster of newly constructed brick dwellings with solar panels on the roofs. They were smart, but the residents clearly had more time and less money than the farmers I had seen in Henan. The stalks from the harvest were carefully bundled and stacked outside every home rather than burned in the fields.

Everything felt new and transient. Wei’s children and grandchildren showed us into a house that smelled of plastic and fresh paint. The furniture was still covered by the factory wrapping and the ceiling light was a fluorescent lamp rather than the naked bulb that was more usual in a farmer’s home. Even the wall portrait of Mao Zedong was shiny and plastic-coated. The colors were so garish that the dead chairman appeared to have transmuted into an Indian deity with lipstick and eye shadow.

The family were warm hosts, plying my assistant and me with fruit and tea as we waited to be properly introduced to the old couple. Wei seemed to find my assistant, with her city ways, almost as strange as a foreigner. When he shook her hand, he held on for almost a minute, scrutinizing her smooth fingers and palms so carefully that it was unclear whether he was trying to read her future or envying a past so evidently free of manual labor.

But, later, as he smoked and smiled, his wife, Guo, did most of the talking. During their childhood, she said, they often had no money for clothes and no food at all. Wei’s young brother died of starvation during the famine of 1930. Thirty-one years later, after the Great Leap Forward, there was another. Guo recalled starving people from neighboring villages dropping dead in the streets as they went out to forage for food. Ten years earlier, they had suffered again: when their son and his wife, who already had two children, broke family-planning regulations by having twins, half the family’s land and furniture was confiscated as a punishment.

Life was still tough today. Guo told me about conditions in a neighboring village deeper in the hills. “There are droughts nine out of ten years,” she said, “so they learn to make one harvest last a decade.”

“Why don’t they move like you did?” I asked. “The authorities are doing it in stages. It isn’t easy to find land for everyone. And not everybody wants to move.”

I asked her to take me to their old home. It was a twenty-minute drive across a rutted, blasted landscape of crumbling orange earth, gray grit, and splotches of white alkaline discoloration. Bleakly beautiful though it was, I struggled to imagine how such an environment could support human life, or life of any sort.

We drove alongside a dry riverbed that usually flooded just once a year for just four or five hours and then trickled dry. On the far bank I spied several dozen mud-brick buildings in various stages of collapse. It looked like an ancient ruin.

“That’s where we lived,” Guo said.

We got out of the car, walked across the riverbed, clambered up a bank dusted with white alkaline deposits, and entered the ghost village. Eight hundred people had lived here a few years earlier, but it was now in the process of being repossessed by the elements. All that was left of the community were crumbling walls, torn paper windows, and fading New Year decorations on the doors.

Guo’s was the only one still locked. She opened it up and invited us inside. The house was spacious and well proportioned with a large courtyard. In its day, it would probably have been the best in the village. But the poverty was evident in the rough earthen floor and the newspapers used to insulate and decorate the walls. There was no running water, no electricity. “This was our light,” said Guo, holding out an old Red Bull can with a kerosene wick sticking out of the opening.

The area was barely fit for human habitation. In the winter the ground froze and snow often blanketed the land. In spring and summer the village was frequently buffeted by sandstorms that choked the lungs and scratched the faces of residents. Guo said these had become more frequent and more frightening in recent years. Crops had become harder to grow. It was drier, warmer than in the past. There was less rainfall. Life was unbearably tough.

I was surprised that I had not yet seen the Great Wall, even though one of the oldest sections was marked on the map as being next to the old village. Considering that the wall was widely (though incorrectly) believed to be the only man-made structure visible from space, it seemed strange that it was not obvious. I asked Guo where it was.

“It is just outside, though it is not easy to make out,” she replied.

That proved an understatement. Long before the village, the Great Wall in this area had been claimed by the harsh environment. All that was left was a snaking mound of mud that blended into the landscape. The heaped-earth ramparts had been abandoned more than a century ago and were now covered in gravel and scrub. Guo had to point out where they once stood, the swelling of red earth that I had just crunched under my feet. Visible from space? It was barely visible even as I stood on top of it.

The same thing was happening to mankind’s best-known fortification as was happening to the rest of northern China. The threat of drought and desertification was evident the entire length of the Great Wall, from Xinjiang in the far west to Hebei on the east coast, over 6,000 kilometers away.

China’s ancient fortifications are far more complex and environmentally significant than is commonly understood. Contrary to its singular name, the Great Wall is a series of ramparts and spurs, as well as the main trunk that snakes across northern China. In part, they are made of little more than mud. Elsewhere, they are impressive brick structures.

Construction of many of the best-known stretches began in the Qin era (221–206
BC
) to keep out northern invaders. Over the following centuries,
the walls were widened, lengthened, and strengthened. This massive engineering project separated two cultures and ecosystems. The settled Han agriculturalists of the southern plains wanted to protect their fields from the roaming Mongol pastoralists of the northern steppe. The wall marked the boundary between their two differing approaches to nature: fixed control versus nomadic anarchy. The cultures reflected the environments: fields and valleys against sand dunes and grassland. The wall was an attempt to keep both the climate and the enemy at bay.

It was unsuccessful on both counts. The wall was breached by both at various times in history. Mark Elvin, an environmental historian, has linked the territorial power shifts with climate change.
³
In extended eras of low temperatures—such as the Little Ice Age—the Mongolian nomads were driven south to escape the cold and find new grassland and food sources. During warmer periods, the Han were able to expand their fields northward. The Great Wall was once a boundary between China and Mongolia, but the territory of the Han now stretches hundreds of kilometers farther north. The sands, however, are not so easily conquered. For decades, northern deserts have been invading southern arable land. The Great Wall was no defense. More than half of the original structure is either buried, crumbling, or torn down.
⁴

Standing on the crenellated outline of the buried ramparts, I could see why William Lindesay, one of the first to walk the length of the wall, described it as “the backbone of a dinosaur.”
⁵
The structure here was the broken relic that seemed to belong more to archaeology than history.

Guo and Wei were part of a mass retreat to the southeast. After centuries of land conquest and reclamation, the government was moving millions of people off fragile land that could no longer bear their weight. Pan Yue, deputy minister of the state environmental protection ministry, estimated that desertification would force the resettlement of 186 million people, about one in seven of the population.

Guo accepted that there was no choice: “We had to move because there was no water. There were times when we couldn’t grow things for ourselves so we relied on government support. But in the new place, life is better. We can grow our own food because they have diverted the Yellow River to ensure we have enough water.”
⁶

We said farewell and wished the eco-refugees luck. Driving back to the main road, I saw the massive plumbing operation that made Guo and
Wei’s new lives possible. The fields were flanked by concrete channels, intersected by steel pipes, and overshadowed by a giant elevated water tank. These hydroengineering works represented a fallback line of defense against the sands. But this barrier too was vulnerable because it depended on China’s most overused and abused resource: the Yellow River.

Even before the rush of modern development there were few harder-working waterways on the planet. For almost half its 5,465-kilometer length, the world’s sixth-largest river passes through desert sands, loess, and arid grasslands, nurturing 140 million people. Without the “Mother River,” as it is also called, there would be little cultivation in these dry northern plains and China as we know it would not exist. The Middle Kingdom emerged between the Great Wall and the Yellow River. Both are vital elements in the battle against entropy. Ultimately, the skeleton of Han civilization is made up of walls and dikes.

Since ancient times, emperors have tried to harness the Yellow in the fight against the desert. It has proved a fickle ally. The river bears the burden of thousands of years of environmental degradation. No other waterway in the world carries as much silt.
⁷
Most of it comes from the Loess Plateau, which is a France-sized monument to erosion. The fragile soil here was formed by layers of windblown dust accumulated over two million years and held in place by trees and other vegetation. But about 5,000 years ago, soon after man began felling trees and clearing land for cultivation, the loess returned to its windblown state. Stripped of its protective layer, billions of tons of orange loess dust are carried off by the river, hence its name. One theory has it that the first mention of Huanghe (Yellow River) came in the Han era around 2,000 years ago, when the water started to discolor.

The soil erosion has turned vast expanses of Gansu, Inner Mongolia, and Shaanxi into dust bowls. Beijingers feel the consequences every spring when the city is buffeted by sandstorms. The riparian communities along the Yellow are more likely to suffer in the summer, when the combination of sediment buildup and floodwater used to make the river writhe destructively up and down the delta.
⁸
Accumulated downstream, the silt raises the surface of the water far above the land, with often devastating consequences.
⁹
Millions have died in the roughly 1,500 floods recorded in the Yellow’s history, hence its other nickname “China’s Sorrow.”
¹⁰

Ancient rulers were judged by their ability to tap and placate this river.
Even today, the giant dam at Sanmenxia is inscribed with the words “When the Yellow River is at peace, China is at peace.”
¹¹
The saying is attributed to the legendary emperor Yu (
c.
2100
BC
), who is seen as the first in a long line of hydroengineering leaders that continues to this day.
¹²
The challenge they face now is not how to tame the river but how to keep it alive. With more hydro plants, thirstier cities, and ever greater demands from agriculture, the Yellow has come close to choking.
¹³
Just how near became shockingly apparent in 1997, when it failed to reach the sea for 226 days. If that was not bad enough, the artery is also growing more polluted.
¹⁴