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Copyright © 2010 by Jonathan Watts

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Contents

Southwest Nature .................................................................. 8

1 Useless Trees ............................................................... 9

2 Foolish Old Men ............................................................ 21

3 Still Waters, Moving Earth .................................................... 32

4 Fishing with Explosives ...................................................... 43

Southeast Man ................................................................... 54

5 Made in China? ............................................................. 55

6 Gross Domestic Pollution ..................................................... 64

7 From Horizontal Green to Vertical Gray ......................................... 75

8 Shop Till You Drop ......................................................... 82

Northwest Imbalance .............................................................. 94

9 Why Do So Many People Hate Henan? .......................................... 95

10 The Carbon Trap .......................................................... 106

11 Attack the Clouds! Retreat from the Sands! ..................................... 116

12 Flaming Mountain, Melting Heaven .......................................... 126

Northeast Alternatives ............................................................ 136

13 Science versus Math ....................................................... 137

14 Fertility Treatment ........................................................ 151

15 An Odd Sort of Dictatorship ................................................. 163

16 Grass Roots .............................................................. 177

Afterword Peaking Man .......................................................... 191

Acknowledgments ................................................................... 196

Notes ............................................................................. 198

Introduction: Beijing ......................................................... 198

1. Useless Trees: Shangri-La ................................................... 199

2. Foolish Old Men: The Tibetan Plateau ......................................... 202

3. Still Waters, Moving Earth: Sichuan ........................................... 204

4. Fishing with Explosives: Hubei and Guangxi .................................... 208

5. Made in China? Guangdong ................................................. 211

6. Gross Domestic Pollution: Jiangsu and Zhejiang ................................. 214

7. From Horizontal Green to Vertical Gray: Chongqing .............................. 217

8. Shop Till You Drop: Shanghai ............................................... 219

9. Why Do So Many People Hate Henan? Henan ................................... 221

10. The Carbon Trap: Shanxi and Shaanxi ........................................ 225

11. Attack the Clouds! Retreat from the Sands! Gansu and Ningxia .................... 227

12. Flaming Mountain, Melting Heaven: Xinjiang .................................. 228

13. Science versus Math: Tianjin, Hebei, and Liaoning .............................. 232

14. Fertility Treatment: Shandong ............................................... 235

15. An Odd Sort of Dictatorship: Heilongjiang ..................................... 239

16 Grass Roots: Xanadu ...................................................... 247

Afterword: Peaking Man ...................................................... 250

Bibliography ....................................................................... 251

Books ..................................................................... 251

Reports, presentations, and academic papers ...................................... 256

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Index ............................................................................. 260

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Praise for When a Billion Chinese Jump

“This is the book on China and climate change that the West has been waiting for. Watts uses his long

experience of China to track the country’s environmental calamity up close, uncovering its causes, its

contradictions and its shocking human toll. Then he poses perhaps the most seminal question of all—can it

save itself and, by extension, the planet?”

—James Kynge, author of China Shakes the World

“The world’s chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change rests in large part with decisions being made

today in Beijing. If China raises its standard of living to Western standards without controlling the

emissions from industry and power plants, it will wreak havoc with the world’s climate—with

unforeseeable and irreversible consequences. If it takes the road now opening up to a low-carbon economy

and leads the world in developing and deploying clean energy technologies, it can show the way to a

sustainable future for the planet. Jonathan Watts turns a keen eye on China’s choices—previously made

and yet to come—that will affect us all.”

—Timothy E. Wirth, president, United Nations Foundation

and Better World Fund

“Jonathan Watts brings us up to date on China’s economic miracle and the environmental consequences

not only for China but for the entire world. With wonderful travelogue-like writing, Watts takes us on an

incredible journey through today’s China—and our tomorrow.”

—Lester R. Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute and author

of Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization

“This is the environmental book that I am most looking forward to for 2010. I admire Jonathan Watts for

his rigorous approach to journalism and his devotion to human stories at the grass roots.”

—Ma Jun, founder of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs and author of China’s Water Crisis

“A fascinating, engaging, and beautifully written book. Jonathan Watts shines a light onto an issue that

affects us all but of which we are woefully ignorant. This book succeeds in both informing and

entertaining us. It is a masterpiece.”

—George Monbiot, author of

Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning

“This is a spectacularly important book, superbly researched and engagingly written. Jonathan Watts has

given us a shocking eyewitness account of China’s environmental meltdown. It should be compulsory

reading for all.”

—Rob Gifford, NPR Shanghai correspondent

and author of China Road

“Watts has written a nationwide audit of where China’s environment stands as of the end of the first

decade of the twenty-first century. His eyewitness accounts are the great strength of this important book.”

—Kerry Brown, Times Higher Education (UK)

“An excellent read. A few good gags in it, too, something few writers on China dare ever to try.”

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—Paul French, author of Through the Looking Glass:

China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao

“Meticulously documented, wide-ranging account … this is a revealing and depressing book. There is no

‘middle truth’ in it. During his painstaking investigative journeys, which called on all his powers as a top-

class reporter, Jonathan Watts concluded that ‘China has felt at times like the end of the world.’”

—Jonathan Mirsky, Literary Review (UK)

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Introduction

Beijing

As a child, I used to pray for China. It was a profoundly selfish prayer. Lying in bed, fingers clasped

together, I would reel off the same wish list every night: “Dear Father, thank you for all the good things in

my life. Please look after Mum and Dad, Lisa (my sister), Nana, and Papa, Toby (my dog), my friends

(and here I would list whoever I was mates with at the time), and me.” After this roll call, the sign-off was

usually the same. “And please make the world peaceful. Please help all the poor and hungry people, and

please make sure everyone in China doesn’t jump at the same time.”

That last wish was tagged on after I realized the enormousness of the country on the other side of the world.

For a small British boy growing up in a suburb of an island nation in the 1970s, it was not easy to grasp the

scale of China. I was fascinated that the country would soon be home to a billion people. 1 I loved numbers,

especially big ones. But what did a billion mean? An adult explained with a terrifying illustration I have

never forgotten. “If everyone in China jumps at exactly the same time, it will shake the earth off its axis

and kill us all.” 2

I was a born worrier and this made me more anxious than anything I had heard before. For the first time,

my young mind came to grips with the possibility of being killed by people I had never seen, who didn’t

know I existed, and who didn’t even need a gun. I was powerless to do anything about it. This seemed both

unfair and dangerous. It was an accident waiting to happen. Somebody had to do something!

Life suddenly seemed more precarious than I had ever imagined. In variations of my prayer, I asked God

to make sure that if Chinese people had to jump, they only did it alone or in small groups. But in time, my

anxieties faded. With all the extra maturity that comes from turning six years old, I realized it was childish

nonsense.

I did not think about the apocalyptic jump again for almost thirty years. Then, in 2003, I moved to Beijing,

where I discovered it is not only foolish little oiks who fear China leaping and the world shaking. In the

interim, the poverty-stricken nation had transformed into an economic heavyweight and added an extra

400 million citizens. China was undergoing one of the greatest bursts of development in history and I

arrived in the midst of it as Beijing prepared for the 2008 Olympics.

The city’s transformation was vast and fast. Down went old hutong alleyways, courtyard houses, and the

ancient city walls. Up rose futuristic stadiums, TV towers, airport terminals, and other monuments to

modernization. Restaurants and bars one day were piles of rubble the next. Tens of thousands of old walls

were daubed with the Chinese character chai (demolish). The hoardings around a nearby development site

were decorated with giant pictures of the old city and a half-mocking, half-mournful slogan: “Our old town:

Gone with the wind.”

Living amid such a rapidly shifting landscape, it was hard to know whether to celebrate, commiserate, or

simply gaze in awe. The scale and speed of change pushed everything to extremes. On one day, China

looked to be emerging as a new superpower. The next, it appeared to be the blasted center of an

environmental apocalypse. Most of the time, it was simply enshrouded in smog.

Soon after arriving, I walked home before dawn one morning in a haze so thick I felt completely alone in a

city of 17 million people. The milky white air was strangely comforting. Skyscrapers had turned into

thirty-story ghosts. The world seemed to have vanished. Yet it was also being remade. Overhead, cranes

loomed out of the mist like skeletal giants.

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Over the following years, the crane and the smog were to become synonymous in my mind with the two

biggest challenges facing humanity: the rise of China and the damage being wrought on the global

environment. The builders were constructing the most spectacular Olympic city in history. The chimney

emissions and car exhausts were destroying the health of millions and helping to warm the planet as never

before.

The year after my arrival, China’s GDP overtook those of France and Italy. Another year of growth took it

past that of Britain—the goal that Mao Zedong had so disastrously set during the Great Leap Forward fifty

years earlier. From 2003 to 2008, China stopped receiving aid from the World Food Programme and

overtook the World Bank as the biggest investor in Africa. Its foreign-exchange reserves surpassed those

of Japan as the largest in the world. The former basket-case nation completed the world’s highest railway,

the most powerful hydroelectric dam, launched a first manned space mission, and sent a probe to the moon.

This was a period in which the population increased at the rate of more than 7 million people per year,

when more than 70 million people moved into cities, when GDP, industrial output, and production of cars

doubled, when energy consumption and coal production jumped 50 percent, water use surged by 500

billion tons, and China became the biggest emitter of carbon in the world. 3

As a parent, I worried for my two daughters’ health when the air became so bad that their school would not

let pupils out at break times. I feared too for my lungs. A regular jogger since my teens, I found myself

wheezing and puffing after even a short run. When the coal fires started burning each winter, I suffered a

dry, rasping cough that sometimes left me doubled up. In Beijing I was to suffer two bouts of pneumonia

and, for the first time in my life, I was prescribed a steroid inhaler. The city was choking and so was I.

To be in early twenty-first-century China was to witness the climax of two hundred years of

industrialization and urbanization, in close-up, playing at fast-forward on a continentwide screen. It soon

became clear to me that China was the focal point of the world’s environmental crisis. The decisions taken

in Beijing, more than anywhere else, would determine whether humanity thrived or perished. After I

arrived in Beijing, I was first horrified at the chaos and then excited. No other country was in such a mess.

None had a greater incentive to change.

The environment had become a national security issue and the government started to respond. The

leadership—the hydroengineer Hu Jintao and the geologist Wen Jiabao, or President Water and Premier

Earth, as I came to think of them—started to shift the communist rhetoric from red to green. They wanted

science to save nature. Instead of untrammeled economic expansion, they pledged sustainability. If their

goals were achieved, China could emerge as the world’s first green superpower. Alternatively, if they

failed and the world’s most populous nation continued to leap recklessly onward, our entire species could

tip over the environmental precipice.

These were the extremes. The truth was probably somewhere in between—but where? That became the

biggest question of my time in China. For the first five years as a news correspondent for the Guardian,

the environment was my primary concern. After that it became such an obsession that I took six months

off for private research trips and then returned to a new post as Asia environment specialist. Traveling

more than 100,000 miles from the mountains of Tibet to the deserts of Inner Mongolia, I witnessed

environmental tragedies, consumer excess, and inspiring dedication. I went to Shangri-La and Xanadu,

along the Silk Road, down coal mines, through dump sites, and into numerous cancer villages. I saw the

richest community, the most polluted city, and the foulest sea. On the way I talked to leading

conservationists, politicians, lawyers, authors, and China’s top experts on energy, glaciers, deserts, oceans,

and the climate. Most compelling were the stories of ordinary people affected in extraordinary ways by a

burst of human development and climate change the like of which the world had never seen before.

This, then, is a travelogue through a land obscured by smog and transformed by cranes; one that examines

how rural environments are being affected by mass urban consumption. What are we losing and how?

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Where are the consequences? Can we fix them? It projects mankind’s modern development on a Chinese

screen.

Though the chapters progress through regions and themes, the structure is polemical rather than

geographic. When I had to choose between a strong case study and a line on the map, I opted for the

former even if that occasionally meant leapfrogging provinces, returning to some places twice, and cutting

across boundaries. Lest anyone fear that I am asserting a new territorial claim by Dongbei on Inner

Mongolia, or by the southeast on Chongqing, I should state their place in these pages is determined by the

powerful trends they illustrate. Similarly, my apologies to anyone who feels slighted or frustrated by my

selective approach. Omission of a province is not intended to dismiss its importance any more than

inclusion is meant to indicate a paradigm case.

The choice of location and topics in these pages is determined purely by my own experience. Even over

many years and miles, that is limited. China is simply too vast and changing too fast to capture in its

entirety. Starting from the world’s high, wild places and descending into the crowded polluted plains, the

book tracks mankind’s modern development and my own growing realization: now China has jumped, we

must all rebalance our lives.

Southwest

Nature

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1 Useless Trees

Shangri-La

A man with a beard is respected. The same applies to mountains. A person with a beard and hair is like a

mountain covered with forest and grass. In the same vein, a mountain sheltered in forest and grass is like a

person well clothed. A barren mountain is no different from a naked person, exposing its flesh and bone.

An unsheltered mountain with poor soil painfully resembles a penniless and rugged man.

—Inscription on monument found in Yunnan, dated 1714 1

Paradise is no longer lost. According to the Chinese government, Shangri-La can be found at 28° north

latitude, 99° east longitude, and an elevation of 3,300 meters at the foot of the Himalayas in northwest

Yunnan Province. I started my journey at this self-proclaimed mountain idyll with the intention of working

my way down and across China, tracking the progress of development on the way. Shangri-La seemed a

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fitting place to begin. Environmentalists considered it pristine, economists thought it backward. I planned

to search here for natural and philosophical ideals, for untouched origins. But I may have arrived too late.

Bumping along a dirt road through the mountains, I spied muddy hovels and forests spoiled by the

blackened aftermath of logging teams. Gray drizzle doused a blaze of purple azaleas and white

rhododendron shrubs. A track cut through a field of flowers to an alpine pool scarred on one side by the

stumps of dozens of felled trees. The landscape, once one of the most stunning in China, had been violated.

For millennia, Bigu Lake in the heart of the region was protected by its remoteness. Although worshipped

by local Tibetan communities, it was not mentioned in the extensive canons of Chinese literature.

Government administrators and poetic wanderers rarely made it this far. It was too poor, too little known,

too difficult to exploit.

All that changed in December 2001, when the Chinese authorities found a new way to sell northwest

Yunnan’s beauty: they renamed the region Shangri-La. As well as being a brilliant piece of marketing, the

appropriation of a fictional Utopia dreamed up seventy years earlier on the other side of the world was a

remarkable act of chutzpah for a government that was, in theory at least, communist, atheist, and

scientifically oriented.

The tourist trickle quickly became a flood. Road builders, dam makers, and hotel operators added to the

height of the swell. Beauty was marketed as fantasy, often with disastrous consequences. When the Oscar-

nominated filmmaker Chen Kaige wanted a spectacular location for a new kung fu blockbuster, The

Promise, he came to Bigu Lake and completely reconfigured the idyllic landscape. With the enthusiastic

support of the local government, the director’s team built a road through the field of azaleas, drove 100

piles into the lake for a bridge, and erected a five-story “Flower House” for the love scenes. Nobody took

responsibility for the consequences. 2 After he ended shooting, the concrete-and-timber house was left

dilapidated; the ground was strewn with plastic bags, polystyrene lunch boxes, and wine bottles. The lake

was split in half by a bridge nobody needed. A temporary toilet and road besmirched the landscape, and

locals demanded compensation for sheep that choked to death on the refuse.

I had come with one of the environmental activists who exposed the scandal and forced a cleanup. Zeren

Pingcuo was a thickset Tibetan who worked as a nature photographer and conservationist. He was a man

of few words, but what he said was usually to the point.

“Sacred places are no longer sacred,” he said, showing me before-and-after pictures of development in

which lakesides and pastureland quickly filled with tourists, cars, and hotels.

He showed me older pictures of his Himalayan home: breathtaking scenes of hillsides decked with azaleas

in spring, lush green valleys in summer, a forest in glorious autumn reds and golds, and mountain

snowscapes in winter. There were intimate portraits of Naxi children and Tibetan monks, and lively scenes

from monasteries, markets, and festivals. That idyll had first been disturbed in the eighties and nineties by

logging teams, then by tourism.

As our car climbed the steep mountain road, the destruction became more evident. Vast tracts of spruce

forest were chopped and burned. The hillsides were filled with the blackened, stumpy corpses of trees and

the withered brown saplings that were supposed to replace them but had failed to take.

“This all used to be virgin forest, but now it is an ecological war zone,” said Zeren. “The timber companies

came here and cleared the hillsides.”

His home village of Jisha, which nestled in a high mountain valley, was suffering the results. He explained:

“With less forest cover, there are fewer birds. With fewer birds there are more insects. And more insects

means more damage to the crops.”

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Although many locals believed their home was Shambala—a form of heaven on earth—Zeren was no

romantic about the past. Before development, life for locals was tough and often short. But, even among

his own people, the long-term trends disturbed him.

“Tibetans have lived in harmony with nature for hundreds of years. But now we consume in a decade what

we used to use in a century.”

I too was here to get a taste of Shangri-La, albeit for work. I had come to look at beliefs. At the time,

commentators in China complained their nation was mired in a grimy materialist mind-set that lacked an

ideal of what a better world might look like. I wanted to see the alternatives. In such a diverse nation there

were many: Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, nature worship, romantic escapism, and political

utopianism. Shangri-La seemed as good a place as any to start.

But as I soon came to realize, searching for paradise was a complicated business, particularly when there

were furiously competing claims to be the “real” Shangri-La. The word first appeared in the 1933 fantasy

Lost Horizon by the British novelist James Hilton. After a crash landing on the Tibetan Plateau, the

Western survivors stumble across the idyll of Shangri-La:

A strange and half-incredible sight … It was superb and exquisite. An austere emotion

carried the eye upwards from milk-blue roofs to the gray rock bastion above … Beyond that,

in a dazzling pyramid, soared the snow slopes of Karakal … the loveliest mountain on earth.

(p. 66)

This resonated with visions of an earthly paradise found in other religions. The elements are remarkably

consistent: fertility, diversity, color, tranquillity, and sparse, peaceful populations. These tropes form a

baseline of sorts for man’s ideal view of the world. In economic terms, paradise is a place where natural

supply exceeds human demand, where there is plenty of everything.

Hilton’s interwar fantasy was conceived not in southwest China but in northeast London, in Woodford

Green, a Sunday afternoon’s drive away from my home in Barnet. Hilton never revealed the source of his

inspiration, but the closest the author ever got to the Himalayan or Kunlun ranges was Pakistan. His

descriptions of the mountain Utopia were widely—though probably not accurately—believed to be based

on scientific studies and National Geographic reports about Yunnan by the eccentric U.S. botanist-

adventurer Joseph Rock. 3

The Shangri-La myth of a land that could reseed human civilization after the planet was destroyed by war

struck a chord in the 1930s, when development seemed geared only toward industrial destruction. After the

award-winning Hollywood director Frank Capra released a film version in 1937, it became the ultimate

escapist fantasy for a world on the brink of military conflict. Franklin D. Roosevelt named his newly

converted presidential retreat in Maryland Shangri-La. 4

Hilton’s utopian dream was later transformed into a marketing gimmick. In 1992, Asia’s biggest luxury

hotel group was founded in Hong Kong with the Shangri-La name. Market research suggested that the

majority of Western tourists to Tibet and Nepal came seeking a Shangri-La experience. 5 China’s

communist authorities started to take notice. Although the state had spent years dismissing Hilton’s

fantasies as romantic nonsense, local governments suddenly began competing with one another to be

recognized as Shangri-La. The fiercer the rivalry, the more distorted the utopian ideal became.

I headed to Lijiang, Joseph Rock’s base from 1922 to 1949. Like all of northwest Yunnan, the setting was

idyllic. In the old town, traditional wood buildings sloped up the hillside, the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain

towered in the distance, and the streets thronged with a colorful ethnic mix. The city was historically rich.

Kublai Khan’s troops crossed the river here. The Red Army passed through on their Long March. For

decades, the spectacular setting, Naxi-minority architecture, and canal-lined streets attracted artists, writers,

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and adventurers. After 1996, when it was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it became a

fixture on the banana-pancake trail of foreign backpackers. 6 After the rebranding of northwest Yunnan as

Shangri-La, this swelled into a wave of domestic travelers. 7

Lijiang was a center of Dongba shamanistic culture. Its followers believed the overuse of natural resources

would invite the wrath of heaven because man and nature were half brothers. This worship of nature was

thought to have its roots in the ancient Bon spiritual tradition that was once the dominant belief system in

the Himalayas and gave Tibetan Buddhism its animistic character, notably the worship of mountains and

lakes. But those values had been marginalized by an influx of outsiders.

Wandering through the cobbled alleys in the afternoon, I saw flag-waving tour guides steer coachloads of

Han—the ethnic majority in China—from trinket shop to trinket shop. In the evening I strolled along the

raucous bar street by the canal. The picture-postcard scene of willow trees, limpid waters, and rough-hewn

stone was illuminated by hundreds of red lanterns, neon signs, and the flashes of tourist cameras. The

traditional wooden structures were packed to the rafters. Tourists joined girls in colorful Naxi costume in

singing contests between balconies on either side of the stream. Some of the women claimed to be from

the nearby Mosuo matriarchal community, where a tradition of “one-night marriages” has become

synonymous with free love. Locals said they were