When a Billion Chinese Jump (36 page)

As we talked, a syrupy pop song popular at the time played repeatedly on the car stereo. Its English lyrics conveyed the zeitgeist of mutability:

They say nothing lasts forever.
We’re only here today.
Love is now or never.
Bring me far away.

I asked Wu the name of the singer, assuming he must be a fan because the track had been playing all the way from Urumqi. “I don’t know, I just downloaded it on my computer,” he said, shrugging.

A wall of lush green hills rose up ahead of us. The road climbed and dipped through a narrow gorge flanked by steep granite slopes and dense pine forests. After the two-dimensional flat pastels of the plain, there was a pleasing variety of shape and color above, below, and on either side. I had time to enjoy it. Our car was twice held up by flocks of goats being shepherded along the narrow road by Kazakh herders on horseback. Such scenes would soon be a thing of the past. Earthmovers and mechanical diggers were laying the foundations for a new highway that would speed tourists through the valley without interruption.

After thirty minutes the pastoral scene on either side of the ravine gave way to an industrial horror story. The valley widened, the light dimmed, and the air thickened. This was no mountain mist or low cloud. It was a putrid haze. The source was an anti-Shangri-La, a dirty secret hidden in the hills: the Houxia power plant and concrete factory, which appeared to be competing with one another to belch the most sulfurous smoke into the sky. Their chimney stacks were too short to lift the gas above the roof of the valley, so the smog gathered denseness, shrouding the dormitories of the workers and the black heaps of coal waiting to be fed into the furnaces.

This industrial estate was another legacy of Mao’s push into the borders. Factories like this were part of preparations for war against the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s, when the chairman declared a “Third Front” in the country’s most remote inland regions. His plan was to scatter China’s industrial base so that it would be safe from bombing. Soldiers and students set about building roads and factories in rural idylls. It was a major cause of disruption of local ecologies.
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We drove onward, upward, and out of the smog. Almost immediately the scenery returned to a bucolic state. The road climbed beside steep gorges, through thick pine forests, and up onto alpine meadows. A familiar muzziness told me the altitude was around 3,000 meters. On the roadside, I spotted the round white yurt of a Kazakh family. We were getting close. The space-seeking nomads dwell in an increasingly narrow band of land just below the snow line and just above the limits of Han settlement. As in Yunnan, the Tibetan Plateau, and elsewhere, an ethnic minority was being pushed farther to the geographic fringes.

The herdsmen roamed the slopes looking for fresh pastures for their sheep and goats. Their movements were seasonal, driven by the weather, which made them more sensitive barometers of climate change than sedentary urban dwellers.

A few miles on, we entered a grassy plain surrounded by glaciers. In the midst was a Kazakh family erecting a yurt for their summer camp. They allowed me to film them as they tied thickly padded walls to a metal frame. The material had to be heavy to keep out freezing mountain winds and was tied in place with wire twists rather than cord knots. Bahebieke, the young head of the family, supervised the work and, between puffs on a cigarette, explained in rudimentary Chinese what was happening. He said the family were moving to this summer camp a week earlier than the previous year and almost a month earlier than five years ago because temperatures were rising. The winters, once bitter and long, were getting shorter and milder.

“It has become warmer, especially these last two years. That glacier used to come all the way down to the road, but now it stops halfway up the slope,” he said, pointing to the wall of ice several hundred meters away.

Warmer climes meant less hardship. Life had improved in other ways. The family had recently acquired a solar panel that gave them enough electricity for a lightbulb and a radio. Bahebieke had switched from a horse to a motorbike. The China mobile signal was so good in the mountains that he could keep in touch with family members working in the city by phone. Their livestock was growing. Looking over to some animals grazing by a meltwater stream, Bahebieke said his family now tended 400 sheep.
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But bigger herds did not necessarily equate to greater wealth.

He was worried about the mountains he roamed. “As the glaciers melt and the temperature rises, there is less snow and rain. That means less
grass. The sheep are not able to get fat. This is the problem we face. For a herdsman, that is a great loss.”

Other nomads had found a new way of making money. For the final ascent to the glacier, I stopped by a couple of yurts to hire a padded jacket and pay for a motorbike ride up the final few hundred meters to the ice field. Fifty years earlier, Zhao and his expeditionary team would have taken hours climbing this rutted, winding track. We juddered up in ten minutes. At the top, overlooking Urumqi Number One, I felt a guilty exhilaration. I was privileged to be in this breathtakingly beautiful place, yet I had come to look for signs of decline. It seemed disrespectful. And difficult. I suddenly realized my inability to grasp the scale of the changes taking place. I knew the history of the glacier’s retreat, that the two lakes of ice had been one giant sea until they split in 1993. I had read that it was thinning at a rate of six meters a year. And I had been told that the water dripping from the glacier could have been locked in place for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. I knew this ancient natural legacy was being wasted and degraded. But, standing in front of the glacier, it still looked utterly huge and magnificent. As at the Three Gorges, perhaps I could not appreciate what had been lost because I had never seen the former glory.

Locals, though, had watched the diminishment of the ice with growing alarm. Ashengbieke, my Kazakh motorbike taxi driver, was only eighteen, but he said the glacier had split in half and changed color since his childhood. “While I was growing up, it used to be very cold here. It used to snow in summer, but now it rains instead. Because of the air pollution, the glacier turned black. It used to be pure white and the two snowfields were joined as one.”

I clambered down a slope to get within touching distance. Up close, the glacier had a cold sensuality. Gnarled, twisted, and crevassed, its deepest, darkest cave concealed a fragile moistening stalactite. The sounds from within rose in intensity from a simple, steady drip, drip, drip near the top to a roaring torrent below. Thirty meters from the main wall, the flood of meltwater cut a tunnel under the dirty gray ice, leaving only a blotchy, wafer-thin crust on the surface. Near my feet, a chunk of ice the size of a piano had fallen from above. Farther down the slope, a lake-sized slab had been isolated from the main glacier. Cut off like a weak animal from a herd, it was being slowly worn down by the heat.

But was this the impact of climate change or just the normal seasonal
melt? I belatedly wondered if I was on a fool’s errand. What could a layman conclude in a few hours about a phenomenon that had to be put in the context of millennia? In the Arctic, global warming was strikingly evident as ice fields collapsed into the ocean and polar bears were stranded on floes. In the mountains, the changes were, well, glacial.

But the incremental movement of the ice had been meticulously tracked since Zhao’s expedition in the 1950s. At a monitoring station a short way down the valley, I met his modern counterpart, Zhang Enzi, a bespectacled glaciologist who had spent the past five years measuring the thickness and length of the five glaciers in the area, as well as the temperature of the air and the ice. Every day, he and his colleagues took readings at 7:45 a.m., 1:45 p.m., and 7:45 p.m. Their results suggested that “glacial” was no longer quite such an appropriate adjective for “slow.”

Zhang was a friendly, worried young man and a believer in anthropomorphic climate change. He told me the ice had been retreating by between eight and ten meters each year. Warmer weather had changed patterns of precipitation. For the first time since records began, rain rather than snow had recently fallen on the peak. There were lakes of melted water at the top of the glacier and more frequent avalanches. The ice was discolored from clouds of soot, also known as black carbon, that billowed across the world from wood fires, diesel engines, and smokestacks in developing nations.
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The effect was just as it had been with the coal dust in the 1950s. Even the Number Five Glacier, which was less vulnerable because it sat in the shadow of the mountain most of the day, had started to shrink for the first time. At the current pace of thinning, the entire glacier field would be gone within 100 years.

That would be a calamity for Urumqi. The glaciers served as solid water reservoirs. Mountains captured snow, rain, and atmospheric moisture during the summer rainy season and slowly released it during dry winter months. This regulating function was particularly important to Xinjiang’s provincial capital, which was flanked by vast deserts. Once the mountains started warming and the glaciers melted, rivers downstream were first at risk of flooding and then, years later, of drying up.

“It’s very frightening,” Zhang said. “This will create huge problems for Urumqi’s drinking water supply.”

But the danger was not widely understood, he told me. For at least twenty years, the extra meltwater would seem a bonus. People would get
used to having more to drink and irrigate with than usual. Many doubted climate change was a problem.
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Others saw it as a boon.

A similar range of views is evident at a national level. Talking to scientists and policymakers in China over the years, I have found the debate about global warming to be less urgent than in developed nations. Nobody doubts change is occurring, but the degree of human—particularly Chinese—responsibility is often questioned, as are the likely consequences and the need to take action. Many expressed a feeling of injustice because China was often blamed for being the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gas. This was understandable. As a latecomer to industrialization, China can claim a lower historical responsibility than developed nations.
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Relative to the size of its population, its carbon footprint is also just a third or a quarter of that of the U.S. and Europe. A major chunk of its emissions is also used in the manufacture of exports, as we saw in Guangdong.

But there is a growing awareness of the need to take action as the impact of climate change becomes clearer. The 1990s was China’s hottest decade in 100 years. I heard from Xiao Ziniu, director general of the Beijing climate monitoring center, that storms were growing fiercer and more frequent in the south, droughts were lasting longer in the north, and typhoons were intensifying near the coast. Rising temperatures were affecting crop production, rainfall patterns, and the pace of glacier melt.

Yet Xiao was not convinced that mankind faced calamity: “There is no agreed conclusion about how much change is dangerous. Whether the climate turns warmer or cooler, there are both positive and negative effects. In Chinese history, there have been many periods warmer than today.”

I recalled Mark Elvin’s theory about the link between changes in global temperatures and power shifts between different cultures. He observed that cooling often coincided with dynastic crises in China, when the Mongolian nomads of the northern steppe tended to intrude southward.
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By contrast, Han society, which was based on the irrigation of low-lying plains, had historically thrived during warmer eras when the area of cultivatable land pushed north. This might partly explain the hesitation of
Chinese scientists to consider climate change as a threat. But the warming could shift from the comfort zone.

It was not far from heaven to hell in Xinjiang. At the foot of the Tian Mountains was the Turpan Depression, the lowest and hottest place in China. In classical literature, this was a symbol of murderous heat. During the Tang dynasty (618–907), the poet Cen Shen wrote, “No living thing can dwell on this mountain, Even birds dare not fly over.” During the summer months, currents of hot air were said to roll up the barren red sandstone slopes of the nearby Flaming Mountain like tongues of fire. Many travelers passed by on the Silk Road, some recording a climate that always seemed to be summer. The most memorable account was by the Buddhist fabulist Wu Cheng’en of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). In his novel
Journey to the West,
Flaming Mountain was so hot that the Buddhist monk Tripitaka and his guardian, the Monkey King, were unable to progress on their quest for enlightenment to Gandhara in India. They learned that the only way to cool the earth was to win over Princess Iron Fan. Today, this episode reads like a global-warming parable or at least a potential advertisement for the wind-turbine manufacturers whose blades are now spinning across much of Xinjiang and northwest China.

Climate change was difficult to pin down. It was too complicated and contradictory to squeeze easily into a given formula. In a small number of cases, glaciers were expanding. The dry plains of Xinjiang were getting more rain than in the past. Some research suggested deserts were absorbing more carbon than previously believed. Assessing the impact was also fraught with imprecision. Global warming was rarely solely responsible for anything. Instead, it intensified existing natural phenomena, such as the summer storms, and accelerated many of the worst trends of human development, such as desertification. In some areas, it even seemed to be beneficial. On the coastal plains, Han farmers enjoyed increased yields as a result of the extra warmth and moisture.

The negative impacts tended to be apparent on the geographic peaks and in the economic depressions. The most dramatic temperature changes were found inland, on high ground during the winter. Melting glaciers in Tibet, Qinghai, Gansu, and Sichuan, dried-up lakes in Hebei and Inner Mongolia, as well as ferocious storms and floods in Guangxi, Guangdong,
and Zhejiang. In the mountain forests of Sichuan and Yunnan, sensitive species of orchid, insect, and reptile were dying out as the temperature warmed.
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Off the coasts of Liaoning, striped seal populations were declining along with the icebergs. Among humans, the worst affected were almost always the poorest: nomads who lost their herds when grasslands were engulfed by deserts, farmers on poor land whose crops shriveled up in droughts, and riverside dwellers whose shacks were destroyed in floods. Usually, they were people living closest to nature. Many were Han. But disproportionately, the impact was probably felt most by the ethnic minorities.
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As they lost livelihoods or escaped to cities, tensions rose. Emotions were particularly strong when indigenous people saw their land and natural resources being taken at the same time by an influx of economic migrants.