When a Billion Chinese Jump (35 page)

The result of this bold thinking was disaster: yet another of the Great Leap Forward’s ill-conceived experiments. Across the country, similarly reckless policies decimated food production and led to a devastating famine. The glacier melting operation was less deadly, but it proved to be a complete waste of time, money, and effort.

“The Gansu team were heavily criticized and their work was stopped,” recalled Zhao. “Their original intention was good. They wanted to solve the problem of drought. Coating snow with coal dust really did provide more water in the short term, but in the long term it made things worse.”

That lesson, learned in the distant mountains of Xinjiang, was to become still more relevant fifty years later, when the entire planet was coated with so much carbon that the mountains once again started to melt. Zhao’s mission, which marked the birth of glaciology in China, ensured that China understood the consequences.

The first ice field they encountered, unimaginatively named Urumqi Number One, has become a benchmark for climate change in China.
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Retracing Zhao’s steps on a journey to the west, I learned that the measurements taken here since the 1950s have done more than anything to convince a skeptical nation that it needs to act on global warming. In Xinjiang, one of the nation’s most strategically important regions, climate change was becoming a national security issue.

My plane touched down in Urumqi Airport close to midnight. I was thrilled to arrive. Central Asia was a region that my Anglocentric education had neglected, but its geography and history were compelling.
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Until the advent of ocean travel, Xinjiang—then known as East Turkestan or Uighurstan—was the often tumultuous meeting place of East and West.
Physically, the region’s angular features are formed by a horseshoe of mountain ranges, the world’s third-biggest desert, and two giant basins, each home to a predominant culture: Kazakh nomads in the northern Dzoungar, and Uighur oasis dwellers in the southern Tarim.

Sited at the center of the Silk Road, the great trade route across the continent, Xinjiang has been traversed by Marco Polo and pillaged by all of the great historical rampagers: Attila the Hun, Tamerlane, Alexander the Great, and Genghis Khan. Spies and explorers, including Francis Young-husband, intrigued here during the Great Game era, when Britain and Russia dueled for control of central Asia.
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The territory was rarely stable for long. As I was to find out, it was also highly vulnerable to migration and climate shifts.

The causes and effects of global warming are rarely so closely juxtaposed as in Urumqi and its glaciers. European, American, and Japanese cities are far from the polar ice caps where the greenhouse gases they emit wrought their greatest damage. But in China’s far west, carbon and its consequences sit side by side.

Xinjiang, which means New Dominion, is the nation’s fossil-fuel front line, containing a third of the nation’s known oil and gas reserves and the biggest untapped coal deposits. Once burned, the impact of this carbon will be felt at the world’s physical extremes, many of which are found in Xinjiang. Drier, wetter, hotter, colder, lower, higher, and bigger than almost anywhere else in China, this Uighur Autonomous Region is an ideal location to assess the changes in the planet’s climate. Yet it has become a global blind spot because it is one of China’s highest-security areas.

Those who have heard of the region tend to associate Xinjiang with desert, but that is only part of the ecological picture. As well as being home to the deepest depression after the Dead Sea and the biggest body of sand after the Sahara, the region is a moisture trap. Its mountains, several of which rise over 7,000 meters, receive more precipitation each year than the annual flow of the Yangtze River.
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Much of it freezes. This makes the region an important part of the “Third Pole,” the central and southern Asian mountains that contain the third-largest body of ice on earth.
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China is home to 46,000 glaciers, more than any other country, but they are shrinking fast in both size and number as temperatures rise faster in the mountains than anywhere else in the country. Two-thirds are expected to disappear in the first half of this century.
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Many are in Xinjiang, where the
Altai and Tian ranges in the north and the Pamirs and Kunlun in the south have seen their snow lines retreat by about 60 meters between 1960 and 2000.
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During the same period, the sparsely populated wilderness on the fractious western border of China has been transformed by a spectacular burst of fossil-fueled activity and an influx of the Han ethnic majority. There are few places on earth where industrialization and globalization have arrived so suddenly.

Chinese children are taught that the region has been part of their country’s territory since 60
BC
.
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But the degree of control has fluctuated enormously, and often been interrupted completely, owing to the mutable and porous nature of Xinjiang’s borders, which touch on eight nations.
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Sovereignty has been more sharply defined in the modern era but remains hotly contested. Today the region is autonomous, but only in the Chinese sense, which is to say the predominantly Uighur local population is free to do anything Beijing likes. The state’s demands on the region have increased along with its strategic importance. In the nation-building 1950s, Mao’s war on nature prompted the first waves of quasi-military pioneers to grow fruit and grain in the desert. Amid the political turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s, Xinjiang was part of the front-line defense against the Soviet Union. Since the 1990s, the government’s focus on economic growth has driven a new wave of migrants to develop the cotton and oil industries under the “Open the Northwest” and “Go West” strategies. Each successive influx has heightened environmental and ethnic pressure.

Even on the drive from the airport to the center of Urumqi, the region’s cultural complexity is apparent. On road signs, Han Mandarin characters sit above sloping Uighur script. On the skyline, domed mosques and minarets peep out among office blocks. On the streets, there is an eye-catching ethnic mix of Kazakhs, Russians, and, of course, Uighurs, the easternmost of the Turkic peoples. Green eyes and brown hair are common here. More men have facial hair, though because this is a mark of the Uighurs’ unique ethnic and religious identity, even a mustache is forbidden among officials—a mark of Beijing’s insecurity regarding the region. Xinjiang is the only region in China where a teacher can be fired for growing a beard.

People even live on different clocks. To enforce a sense of unity, Beijing insists that all of China uses the same time. For Xinjiang, more than 3,000 kilometers west of the capital, this means the summer sun does not
officially rise until 9 a.m. and sets as late as midnight. Unofficially, locals keep Xinjiang time, which is two hours behind Beijing. It can be confusing. When we arranged a car for the journey to the glacier, we first had to agree which of the two clocks to set our alarms by.

At 8 a.m., Beijing time, the road outside the hotel was free of traffic. Locals on Xinjiang time had yet to wake. But our driver, Wu Shibao, was up and waiting. He was used to switching between two clocks and cultures. As we set off, he told us his family history. It was a typically modern story of Han settlement and environmental stress. Turning down the car stereo, he told us he was born in Xinjiang, but his parents were Han. In the 1950s, they had left their homes in distant Anhui in response to a call from Mao Zedong to “bolster the border areas.”

The change wrought by successive waves of migrants became apparent as we drove. Compared with the low-rise mud-brick homes and alleys of a traditional Uighur community, the broad roads, tinted windows, and rectangular buildings of Urumqi marked it out as a settlers’ city. More than 80 percent of the 2 million residents were Han. The provincial capital was one of an increasing number of areas in Xinjiang where Uighurs had become a minority in their own land. We drove for about an hour, passing from gray urbanity through pale plains, and then to the thickening color of irrigated cropland.

The roadsides were a reminder of history. This land was once lightly touched by humanity. In 1950, while the rest of China was overcrowded, Xinjiang was home to only 5 million people. But the wide-open spaces were impossible for Mao to resist. He began diverting part of the country’s rising population into Xinjiang. The propaganda version has it that most of the newcomers were
mangliu
(blind migrants), who were driven by idealism to the far west without knowing what to expect. But many clearly went with their eyes wide open. Huge numbers were fleeing poverty and starvation in overcrowded eastern provinces such as Hunan, Henan, and Anhui. Others, such as the poet Ai Qing, were escaping political purges. Many more were sent by the state. In the 1950s and 1960s, thousands of teenage women were recruited as brides for the lonely pioneer soldiers. Their self-sacrifice is celebrated in the state media as the story of the “Eight Thousand Hunan Maidens Who Went Up Heaven Mountains.” A
less idealized version of their experience suggests they were deceived into going west with false promises of Russian lessons and technical training, only to find out when they arrived that their fate was to be shared out among the older, senior officers.
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During the Cultural Revolution, the stream of people became a flood when Mao encouraged students to go “up to the mountains, down to the countryside.” In a reverse of the urbanization that China is experiencing today, the slogan of that idolatrous age was “The Farther from Father and Mother, the Nearer to Chairman Mao’s Heart.”
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Nationwide, 20 million people went into the countryside. The populations of Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia surged.

The state rallied the pioneers with a call for the idealism and patriotism found in other countries during call-ups for national service during wartime. But those sent to strengthen the border areas ended up using shovels and tractors more than guns and tanks. They converted an area the size of Israel to farmland by irrigating arid plains or requisitioning land from Uighurs.
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In the Taklamakan desert, grain yields reportedly quadrupled in four years, from 1.5 million kilograms in 1966 to 6.5 million kilograms by 1970. The results were proclaimed as a triumph of revolutionary will, but the environmental cost was enormous.

For countless centuries, runoff from the snow-capped mountains gave Xinjiang one of the highest water-to-people ratios in China. This kept oases lush with Euphrates poplars, tamarisk, and calligonum.

But the settlers diverted the rivers for cash crops, particularly in the 1990s when cotton, along with oil, made up the two halves of Xinjiang’s “black-and-white economy.”
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By then Chinese scholars were already warning that Xinjiang’s environmental carrying capacity was being pushed to the limit. There was a precedent of what could go wrong in nearby Uzbekistan, where cotton production had devastated the Aral Sea. But for policymakers in Beijing, a bigger priority was to dilute the ethnic population. The new arrivals needed work. Cotton was the short-term answer, but this meant a huge extra demand on the Tarim and other rivers.
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Countless wadis dried up. The ecological balance was disrupted. Uighur communities were forced to move. Many rare species, such as argali sheep and brown bears, were decimated.
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To the environmentalist Ma Jun, the uncontrolled irrigation was more than just a waste of resources: “This is clearly an ecological crime. Its
victims are the plants, animals, and birds.”
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Large areas of Xinjiang were desiccated. Lop Nor, once the second-largest saltwater lake in China, was effectively soaked up by trillions of cotton buds. In the late 1950s, two-meter-long fish swam in its waters. By 2006, even the smallest species were struggling to survive in what had become a trickle in the desert close to the military’s main nuclear testing ground. With it went the Tarim tiger, the large-headed fish, huge numbers of Bactrian camels, and a greenbelt of poplar forests.
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With the tree barrier gone, the Taklamakan and Kum Tagh deserts joined up, forcing
bingtuan
units to abandon their barracks and fields. They arrived in the 1960s to “defeat the desert.” They left in the nineties, having surrendered more land to the sands than when they arrived.
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During our first stop on the road, I chatted to a young woman wearing a headscarf who had just moved to a new village after marrying a local man. I congratulated her and asked how she liked her new home. “It’s good. This place used to have a bad reputation for being poor, but incomes are rising thanks to tourism,” she said. The problem now was not money but water for the family farm. Every ten days she had to apply for an irrigation permit at the local Communist Party office. If approved, her family received a card entitling them to use water for three hours each day, after which they had to divert the irrigation channel toward another permit holder.

At that point we were interrupted. An official wearing army fatigues strolled over indignantly. “Stop that. No journalists here.” Not wishing to make any trouble for the woman in her new home, I left without complaint. I asked driver Wu why the locals were so sensitive. “This is a military zone and you are a foreigner.” I hadn’t noticed on the way in, when all I had seen were newly constructed tourist lodges, but, sure enough, on the nearby hills were clusters of khaki buildings. A short distance down the road was the Nanshan military airport.

As we drove out of the restricted area, Wu told me he too had been forced to retreat from the land. Before he became a taxi driver, he had inherited the farm his parents created in the wilderness. At first he made a decent income growing leeks and peppers. But around 1998, the land deteriorated and the crops failed year after year. The earth had become useless within two generations.