When a Billion Chinese Jump (28 page)

I met the iconoclast in a bookshop teahouse. He was soft-spoken to the point of shyness, but his eyes blazed with a compassionate fury as he described his latest project: a book about his family in Henan. To understand the turmoil of the past fifty years, he said, it was necessary to look not just at politics and economics but also at the relationship between the environment and people.

He described the changes in his family home in Tianhu, which had swollen since his childhood from a village of 2,000 to a town of 7,000. “The creek that once flowed in front of our home has dried up. The old peach grove has been chopped down. Villagers used to drink from a well three meters deep. Now they go down fifteen and don’t always find water. When the wind blows hard, the sky is filled with so much dust from the nearby cement factory that we have to cover all our belongings with sheets.”

On an individual material level, Yan said this was good. “We live in
concrete homes now instead of mud hovels, the roads are tarmac instead of dirt, but when you consider the environment as a whole, there has been severe damage.” And it has affected human health. Every year he heard of more cases of cancer.

Since his childhood, more than 80 percent of the trees in his village had been felled, and even the Yellow River had at times been reduced to a trickle. A still greater loss, he said, was of the tenderness the villagers formerly felt for the earth. “In the past the land was owned by farmers. They could trace it back to their ancestors, so they loved it and cared for it. But now all they have is usage rights. And even those are often taken away when the local government wants to build factories. So farmers take a different view. Now they think, ‘Why not exploit the land so I can improve my life?’”

Yan’s words were reminiscent of what is arguably the greatest novel in English about rural life in China,
The Good Earth
(1931) by Pearl Buck. Based on the Nobel Prize–winning author’s experience in Anhui (which neighbors Henan) from 1917 to 1920, the book tells the story of a poor hardworking farmer and his wife, who endure famine and urban migration before securing land and making a better life for themselves. Their children, however, do not appreciate the value of the soil and, at the end of the book, scheme to sell it off. This prompts a furious tirade from the father, who loves the soil as if it were his own flesh and blood:

“Now evil, idle son—sell the land! It is the end of a family—when they begin to sell the land. Out of the land we came and into it we must go—if you will hold your land you can live—no one can rob you of land—if you sell the land, it is the end.”

This story of development resonates through the ages.

Yan believed China had cut its ties to the land in the eighties and nineties, when everyone “went crazy” for money. “The army, farmers, government officials, everyone was trying to get rich.” Yan even questioned his own brother, who suddenly became so wealthy at that time that he was able to build a big new home. Where the money came from remained a mystery. “He used to go out who knows where and return with a lorry full of logs,” he recalled.

The rush for cash was responsible for Henan’s—and arguably China’s—worst
health scandal: a blood-farming disaster that left hundreds of thousands of people infected with HIV. It started in the late 1980s, when local health authorities, along with every other branch of government, were suddenly told to generate profits. Short of other resources, Henan’s officials tapped the population. They started milking veins.

Vans were converted into miniclinics and driven out into the countryside. Ambitious farmers established themselves as “bloodheads” (brokers) to meet the demand among both buyers and sellers. For an 800-milliliter donation, villagers were paid 45 yuan (worth about £3 or $6 at the time), enough to feed a family for a week. Realizing they could earn more by giving blood than from tending the land, they lined up several times a week to make donations. By the peak around 1995, Henan had become one of the nation’s blood farms. The methods were either monstrously irresponsible or criminally negligent. In some cases, soy sauce bottles and plastic bags were used to store the blood. Some farmers sold so often, Yan said, they became dizzy and had to be turned upside down to get the blood into the tubes. Plasma was extracted and the remaining blood pumped back into people’s veins so they would be able to donate more frequently. In the rush, basic hygiene procedures were sacrificed and the blood they got back wasn’t always entirely their own. As a result, innumerable donors became infected with HIV. Disaster once again threatened to cull the population.

I had seen the consequences firsthand at one of the villages in 2003. It was my first visit to Henan and appeared to confirm every malicious word said about the province. It was the most depressing place I have ever been to, not least because the authorities were putting more effort into a cover-up than a cure.
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I traveled with an experienced fixer and AIDS activist who helped me sneak in without being detected.
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We drove through a seemingly endless expanse of flat stubble-brown fields to Xiongqiao Village, where residents infected with HIV had fought with riot police the previous week to demand compensation and treatment. A local contact insisted we wait at his home in a nearby town until nightfall. Then, under cover of darkness, we drove deep into the countryside, bumping along a rutted mud road until we saw the torches of our guides flashing in the middle of a field.

We stopped. The guides—Chang Sun and his wife—whispered instructions to keep quiet in case someone overheard and informed the authorities, then led us into the village. Apart from squelching feet, the
only sound was a chorus of frogs and the crackle of firewood. The blaze was part of a funeral ceremony. Chang told us it was the tenth in the tiny community that year, all of AIDS victims.

Many others seemed certain to follow. Chang told me his wife was infected; so were his mother, his aunt, his cousin, his cousin’s wife, their neighbor, and possibly many of the children. Chang’s father had died of AIDS the previous year, his three-year-old daughter the year before that. His first wife threw herself down the village well in 2000 after a doctor told her she was no longer worth treating because she had the virus. The flat brown vegetable fields were steadily filling with mossy green burial mounds.

“It is our custom for strong male adults to carry the coffin, but so many people are sick or dead that there aren’t enough of us left,” the thirty-five-year-old farmer told me. “So now it is the old people who are doing the burying.”

Chang took me to see his cousin, Ming, who had started to show symptoms of the disease a few months earlier. Since being diagnosed, he spent most of his time lying on a bed held together by string, watching snowy black-and-white images on an old television set. The only other light was a naked bulb barely bright enough to read the fading newsprint that served as wallpaper.

“Almost everybody did it,” Ming said between coughs. “We would sell extra if there was a marriage ceremony coming up or if we wanted to build a house. The most I ever did was four donations in a single day.”

Death and darkness filled Chang’s small house, which was literally built with blood money. The mood was set by the black-framed picture of his late father and in the funeral poems for his first wife and child that were pasted on the walls: “The wide land weeps for those we have loved and lost.”

The disease was spreading across generations. The teacher of a nursery school for orphans in nearby Houyang told me all the school’s thirty-eight children had at least one parent who was HIV positive, and many were likely to have contracted the infection in the womb. Only three of the five-and six-year-olds had been tested. All three were positive.

I could think of no grimmer illustration of how China’s short-term rush to riches had drained natural resources and contaminated human lives. In such an overcrowded and overutilized land, I could see why the local government
was desperate to relieve poverty. After you have cleared your trees for cropland, then ruined your cropland for factories, when your rivers ran either dry or black, what was left but blood?
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Deeper problems of poverty, overcrowding, and environmental stress continued to emerge in other forms. A government-sponsored tree-planting program had pushed forest cover from 9 percent to 15 percent in Henan. But Yan said some areas near the AIDS villages had recently suffered a wave of illegal logging. Unable to find work, some people with HIV were cutting down the roadside trees planted as a windbreak. The planks were sold to coal mines for shaft props. Drive through the countryside near Kaifeng, said Yan, and the rows of stumps on stretches of the roadside showed all too clearly how environmental fatigue and human stress fed on one another.

He believed the pressure was reaching the breaking point. “The land gets tired too. But there is no attempt to relieve its burden. Every time I go back home, another patch of ground has been cultivated. Even the little plots outside our homes that used to be untended are now filled. And the croplands are expected to yield two harvests a year. The land must be exhausted.”

The stress on the land has been growing for millennia. As the author James Kynge put it: “Chinese history is very much less the story of multiplication than of long division. The experience of having to share scarce resources among so many people has at times been inconvenient and at times traumatic.”
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After serving an advanced agricultural civilization for so long, the land might well be weary.
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The weight of humanity had grown. Until around 1650, China’s population fluctuated between 50 million and 200 million, rising in times of peace and prosperity and slipping during periods of natural disaster and war.
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Confucianism, which has its roots in Shandong, encouraged propagation. Mencius believed having no children was one of the “three most impious acts.”
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But there is also evidence that family-planning policies were used in ancient times in the form of birth-spacing decrees.

The population began to rise soon after the Manchus seized power in 1644 and changed the tax system to encourage births.
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Along with the introduction of new high-yield crops and relative peace, this created the conditions during the Qing dynasty for the population to almost triple
between 1700 and 1850, when it passed 400 million.
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Malthus was wrong to assume that the China of his age ignored the preventative checks of demographic self-restraint. The severity of the country’s measures would have stretched the imagination of even the sternest British Protestant. In the mid-nineteenth century, the mandarin Wang Shiduo recommended the death penalty for men who married under age twenty-five and women under twenty, and suggested tax incentives for infanticide of second daughters.
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Thanks partly to the demographic restraints of infanticide, gender imbalance, and homosexuality,
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growth flattened briefly, particularly during the wars of the mid-twentieth century, but jagged upward after Mao took power. Communist rule ushered in a period of peace, prosperity, vaccination campaigns, and a basic medical system provided by a new army of “barefoot doctors.” When the first census for decades was taken in 1953, the government was astonished to learn the population had surged to 583 million—more than 100 million beyond expectations.
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How to deal with the consequences became the subject of fierce political debate. The demographer Ma Yinchu warned in 1957 that overpopulation was jeopardizing the country’s development.
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A family-planning policy was tentatively introduced, the marriage age raised, and a condom factory built.

Mao, however, jumped to a contrary conclusion. The founder of the People’s Republic could never accept that more people might mean more problems. Ma was condemned as a rightist and a Malthusian because he advocated controls. Mao advocated big families as the foundation of a strong nation, even giving medals to women who bore large numbers of children. So far as he was concerned, capitalism rather than overpopulation was to blame for the miserable condition of the masses.

Despite the starvation of tens of millions of people after the Great Leap Forward, the 1964 census showed the mainland population had swollen by 100 million. Mao blocked publication of the results. Families grew at a faster than exponential rate. At the peak during the Cultural Revolution, there were 4 births for every 100 people in a single year, one of the highest birthrates ever recorded worldwide.
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Forty years later, the results are still evident in families across China. People born in the sixties usually have at least three siblings, and often four or five, while those in their twenties have none. By 1970, 20 million people were being added to the population
every year. By then even Mao had to grudgingly accept that people power had its limits.
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Mao’s U-turn coincided with a remarkable moment in human history. Sometime around 1965–70 the fecundity of our species peaked. In that small window of time, just after the summer of love in the West and the Cultural Revolution in the East, the growth rate of mankind hit a high of 2.1 percent per year. After that it plunged by half. Our species was rapidly slowing down and aging.

The causes were both physical and social. China’s family-planning policies were a factor in Asia, along with the widespread introduction of the contraceptive pill in the West. But less obvious forces were also at work. After that peak, women became less fertile and men had lower sperm counts. The more wealthy and educated we became, the fewer children we were likely to have and the later in our lives they would be born. Half of us moved into cities. Instead of focusing on growth, more people were worrying about conservation and sustainability. Our species was showing all the signs of middle age. We were becoming less virile and less virulent. For those who believe James Lovelock’s Gaia Theory of the earth as a living organism, it was as though our numbers were being regulated. But whether it was by divine accident or human design, the trend was clearly downward.