When a Billion Chinese Jump (33 page)

An ancient folk saying predicts the Yellow will one day lose its (dis)color. The phrase
Shengren chu, Huanghe qing
(When a great man emerges, the Yellow River will run clear) was once an aspiration. Now, however, this seems so unlikely that the saying has become the Chinese equivalent of “And pigs might fly.” Far from becoming clearer, the spurt of industrial growth in recent years has made the river so polluted it has at various times run not just yellow but pink, green, red, black, and brown.
¹⁵

From Wei’s village I drove to see the source of the worst contamination, the border between Ningxia and Inner Mongolia. The water along this stretch cooled and cleansed the thickest cluster of heavy industry I had seen in China. In return it received hot, dirty emissions that left the water so polluted that it was designated too toxic to touch.
¹⁶
The buildup started near Huinong City, where the banks of the river were punctuated by smokestacks, cooling towers, fertilizer plants, plastic factories, and paper mills. More dramatic still were the scenes on the other side of the city’s bridge as we entered the industrial hellhole of Wuhai. Dust, smog, and exhaust fumes commingled so densely between the barren gray mountain slopes that it was at first hard to make out what was happening on the rocky plain between. Closer up, giant signs for the metallurgical plants and chemical refineries could be made out looming among the tangle of electricity pylons. Giant trucks rumbled out of the gates, churning up grit into the foul-smelling air as they joined an eight-lane jam of mobile tonnage. Farther along the road, smoke poured in hundreds of narrow streams from chimneys atop the long, identical rows of Lowrey-esque redbrick homes.

In just ten years, this blasted outpost had swollen from four factories to five hundred.
¹⁷
Dozens more were under construction. It was aweinspiringly grim. Farther on, sand specters whispered across the road,
curling patterns on the tarmac. Tumbleweed bounced madly in our path. Cyclists and pedestrians wore face masks but still grimaced in the grit and sand. On the roadside, fields gave way to dunes, and thick clouds of sand blurred visibility at ground level, though I could see blue skies above. “This is nothing,” said our driver. “In a real sandstorm the sky grows so dark that you can’t see more than twenty meters.”

Areas of land were still being farmed, but the soil was so degraded that only sunflowers could be planted. When I saw the first patch of alkaline discoloration, I thought it was a sprinkling of snow. But the pale blotches came from the fertilizer and industrial pollution that had seeped into the soil. The white earth appeared to have been sterilized.

In other areas, the pollution was black. We stopped at Wulateqianqi County, the site of a recent contamination incident. The collapse of dikes at two paper-mill containment ponds released a tidal wave of toxic sludge across farmland, two villages, and a stream that flowed into the Yellow River. Fifty-seven homes were destroyed and crops ruined.
¹⁸

I arrived unannounced at the home of Yang Kuan, one of the affected farmers. He was welcoming. Word went around family and neighbors. Soon a small crowd were sitting on the kang
¹⁹
telling me their story.

The gathering was noisy. Feelings were running high as the family recalled the black wave that swept through their lives. Before the incident, the paper mills, Saiwai Xinghuazhang and Meili Beichen, had been ordered to shut down because of their repeated violations of emissions regulations. An earlier spill had killed tens of thousands of fish in the Yellow River.

But, as was often the case in China, the companies ignored the order and continued to operate. On the day in question, it looked as though a rainstorm would flood the mill’s containment ponds and contaminate the Yellow River again. Fearing fines and more criticism, the management channeled their pollution onto farmland instead. There was no warning to local people.

Scraping a living in the dry north had never been easy. After the incident, it became almost impossible. Yang took me out to the fields to see the consequences. It was bitterly cold, but he wanted to show me the land he had lost to the stinking black waters.

“It is ruined. We used to grow corn and wheat, but now it is not really even fit for sunflowers. Nobody wants to buy from us anyway because our
crops have been tainted,” he complained, shaking his head, then repeating himself, “We can’t grow anything now.”

A short distance away, a coal-fired power plant belched smoke into the sky. Part of its energy would go to the paper mills, which were still in business.

The village well was still too polluted to drink so the family had to use the foul water from the taps. The small government allowance they had received by way of compensation was due to run out in a year.
²⁰
“After that I guess we will have to steal or beg,” Yang said. “We have no other income.”

Pollution and drought feed off one another. Contaminated streams and wells worsen water shortages. Rivers with low volumes and weak flows are less capable of flushing out toxins. Both threaten the fertility of the land and the health of the people. Both are evident across northeast China, where temperatures are also rising because of climate change.

Of the 600 cities facing water shortages in China, the vast majority lie either along the Yellow River Delta or in the lands that stretch north from there up to and beyond the Great Wall.

As the quality and quantity of surface water declines, people mine deeper and deeper for alternative supplies. The water table in northern China is falling by more than a meter a year, forcing farmers to dig deeper wells and cities to suck ancient aquifers dry. That is unsustainable. These underground resources might take hundreds of years to be replenished. Tang Xiyang, one of the founders of the green movement in China, described the trend to me in apocalyptic terms: “The Yellow River civilization has been destroyed. People cannot survive on that river anymore.”

With 140 million people having to do just that, government mandarins also appear to feel a sense of crisis. Many of their hugely expensive and socially convulsive countermeasures smack of desperation. The relocation programs have spread ever wider, and their hydroengineering projects get bigger and bigger. The South-North Water Diversion Project, detailed in
chapter 3
, is the biggest gamble yet. Although the massive plan would transform the hydrology of China and possibly much of Asia, engineers felt they had no choice but to press ahead. Northern China could no longer pump water vertically from a few hundred meters underground, so it had started channeling it horizontally hundreds of kilometers from the south. The diversion project was a reinforcement operation.

“This is the only way to solve the water shortage problem,” Sun Feng,
director of the Yellow River Conservancy Commission, once told me. “The western leg is the only one that transfers water directly into the Yellow River so the whole basin will benefit.”

The big outstanding problem is one of quantity rather than quality. The Yellow’s volume is falling as demand rises. The river accounts for just 2 percent of the runoff in China, yet irrigates 15 percent of the country’s crops and supplies water to 12 percent of the population.

At the Yellow River control center in Zhengzhou, the allocation of water among the nine provinces it passes through is marked on another wall-sized screen. The proportion has been fixed since 1987 based on a long-term estimate of 58 billion cubic meters of runoff every year. That has proved a massive overestimate. This year, the runoff is forecast to be less than 50 billion cubic meters. In 2003, it fell below 45 billion. The provinces are supposed to share the impact of the shortfall equally. Yet Ningxia, Inner Mongolia, and Shandong take more than a billion cubic meters of water above their allocation every year without permission.

The loser is the ecosystem. Twenty-one billion cubic meters of water each year are set aside for sediment flushing and maintenance of nonhuman life on the river. This is the area of the water budget that is cut whenever provinces go over their limit. The Yellow River Conservancy Commission has recently conducted research that shows the value of keeping water for wildlife and nature, but they need more power to put this into action.

“Some provinces and reservoirs don’t obey our instructions. They ignore us to generate electricity,” says Yu Xiubo. “It’s a problem. We lack punitive measures.”

Dispersal of authority across agencies and provinces has not helped. To tighten administration, the central government is drafting a Yellow River Law that would give more power to the river’s administrating body. There are also plans for a Digital Yellow River that would allow bureaucrats based in Zhengzhou to remotely control and monitor sluice gates and irrigation channels along the entire length of the river. Currently this is possible only in the lower reaches.

This demand-side solution faces fierce opposition. No province wants to accept a cut in water supplies at a time when they all want to boost industry and agriculture. The latter is by far the biggest drain on the river, accounting for 90 percent of the diverted water, some of which is taken hundreds of kilometers into the desert. Yu and his colleagues are dispatched
to sluice gates during times of drought when the Yellow River Conservancy Commission has to impose a potentially life-determining judgment on water supplies.

“It can be very dangerous,” says Yu. “In the past, our engineers have been thrown into the river by angry residents. In the early days after 1999, nobody wanted to accept us. Upstream residents didn’t care about low-stream demands. They said that, historically, they could always take what they wanted.”

Better regulation of demand is the best option, but upstream provincial governors are reluctant to accept tough controls on a resource that they have always taken for granted. A politically easier solution is to increase supply even if it means huge expense, waste, and environmental stress.

The world’s largest military has been mobilized too. In the battle against the elements, the People’s Liberation Army is in the front line. Troops are often dispatched after natural disasters. The People’s Armed Police are responsible for forest firefighting in the southern provinces. Ahead of the Olympics, thousands of troops were sent to dig an artificial training lake for a rowing team in Shaanxi.
²¹
The navy was deployed to clear up algae that threatened the Olympic sailing events. The air force has variously been used to break up ice dams and spread tree seeds in aerial afforestation missions. But perhaps most striking are its attacks on the clouds. No country in the world pummels the sky with the verve of China. In 2006, there were 590 weather-modifying sorties nationwide. Gansu, one of the driest, poorest regions, had fewer clouds to aim at than most, but its pilots logged sixty-one hours of flight time chasing cumulus.

The gates were locked when I arrived at the Gansu aircraft rain enhancement base. It was winter. The cloudbusting season was over, but one of the caretakers, Ma Dubin, offered to show me around. He was a local man and something of an authority on the strange science of weather modification.

Cloud-seeding experiments began in the United States in 1946, when General Electric (the company that also gave the world hydrofluorocarbons and leaded gas) launched the first experiments. Western scientists soon became skeptical about the results, but the Soviet Union enthusiastically adopted and improved upon the technology. China has now taken it on with a degree of alacrity seen nowhere else on earth.

Inevitably, the start of operations was in 1958—the Great Leap Forward year when, as we have seen in several chapters, China tried to conquer nature with a burst of dam building, sparrow killing, tree felling, and desert greening. Mao Zedong gave the project his stamp of approval: “Man-made rain is very important. I hope the meteorological experts do their utmost to make it work.”
²²

The first cloud-seeding flights were in Gansu and Jilin, where the air force was dispatched to take on the clouds. In the earliest attempts, cannons fired catalytic chemicals into the heavens. Chinese scientists were pleased with the results, estimating the increase in rainfall at 10 to 25 percent. This prompted the government to enact a law encouraging local governments to “enhance leadership over weather modification.” Nationwide, there are now more than thirty provincial-level offices dealing with rain creation, employing over 50,000 people with a budget in excess of $100 million per year.
²³
No other country in the world comes close in matching the scale of this unapologetically man-made climate change.
²⁴

In Gansu, the rainmaking season ran from March 1 to the end of October. During that period, a small squadron of ten pilots moved into the dormitory to be on permanent standby to shoot down approaching clouds. There were three main buildings at the center. The first was the command center, where meteorologists analyzed data from local weather stations. Next to this were accommodations for the pilots, who had a weight machine, table tennis, and a billiard table to while away the hours between missions. There was plenty of free time. On average, they were scrambled only four or five times a month during the summer.

The third building was the storeroom for the chemicals and munitions used to bust the clouds. Outside it was a stack of empty pellet crates from a former weapons plant, Factory No. 556 in Wuhai, that had been converted to manufacture weather-modification devices. On the floor nearby were half a dozen rusting 37-millimeter shells that had been customized to deliver chemical catalysts into the sky. Whether fired from antiaircraft guns below or dropped by planes from above, the aim was essentially the same: to load the clouds with silver iodide or liquid nitrogen that would thicken the water droplets to the point where they became heavy enough or cool enough to fall as snow or rain.

Using these munitions was tricky. No two clouds were ever the same. Even a single cumulus changed constantly as it blew over varying landscapes
at different altitudes across a range of temperatures. Some water was colder than ice. Some rain evaporated before it hit the ground. The variables were so great that scientists in many countries doubted cloud-seeding could ever work, but in Gansu as elsewhere in China, it was adopted with gusto.