When a Billion Chinese Jump (42 page)

Shandong’s history has been shaped by its geography.
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This is where the Yellow River flows into the Bohai Sea. Confucius was born here around 500
BC
and his philosophy of human-centered order has recently enjoyed a resurgence, particularly in his hometown of Qufu.

My journey, though, began at Taishan, the holy mountain where emperors made pilgrimages to beg heaven and earth for the fertility of their land. They were pleading for the Mandate of Heaven.
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These imperial pilgrimages were made easier in 219
BC
, when the tyrant Qin Shihuang had a path built up the mountain. Today, there is a tarmac road and a cable car.

After being winched above the clouds, we joined the tourist throngs wandering through the network of mountaintop temples. At a lower level was a shrine to the Princess of the Rosy Clouds, a Taoist deity believed to help childless women conceive. From there, steep steps led to the 1,532-meter peak, where even the mightiest of men was expected to show humility to the mythical ruler of heaven, the Jade Emperor. The rulers of old could look down from here with a mix of satisfaction and responsibility, knowing they controlled all that they could see across the vast plains and the Yellow Sea. The Taoist emperor Wu was lost for words and famously ordered his stone monument, the Wuzibei, left blank. Mao Zedong, by contrast, was inspired by a glorious sunrise to declare, “The East Is Red.”

On the day I reached the top, it looked more of a murky brown. On either side of the meteorological monitoring station to the east of the peak was a double horizon: the first where the land met the smog; the other where the smog met the sky. The moon appeared mockingly beautiful above them both.

Taishan’s role had changed. In the era of “Scientific Development,” China’s leaders no longer prayed for good harvests at the peak. Instead, they relied on the scientists at the foot of the mountain to find new chemical fertilizers and laboratory-engineered seeds. This was the site of the Shandong Agricultural University, which was pioneering China’s biggest study of genetically modified crops.
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It was on the front line of efforts to improve the efficiency of the country’s fields.

Shandong grows more genetically modified cotton than anywhere else in China and possibly the world. The U.S. agrichemical firm Monsanto found a willing partner here for its first insect-resistant hybrids. Scientists in the province are also developing salt-resistant tomatoes, soybeans, and rice, designed to grow on saline soil near the coast. Just as in hydroengineering, manufacturing, railway building, and skyscraper construction, China is poised to become a major biotechnology player. With laxer regulations and huge government investment, it already leads the world in GM
rice. Scientists predict that half of the country’s agricultural produce will be genetically modified by 2015.
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Though most of the initial bioengineering breakthroughs have been made in the West rather than by China’s agricultural scientists, it hasn’t been for want of trying. During the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, the government encouraged farmers to experiment with grafting and interbreeding. This led to some bizarre genetic experiments and fantastic claims of success, such as a rooster than could lay eggs, the breeding of an earless, tailless pig, ewes that could give birth to quintuplets, and a pumpkin as heavy as a man. Rabbits were interbred with cows and pear trees grown to produce apples. To save the need to dye textiles, scientists spliced cotton and tomato plants. The aim was to produce red fabric, but the results were closer to fluffy tomatoes.
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Today, the world sniggers at the crazy excesses of that era, but researchers across the globe are now conducting much bolder and more bizarre experiments.

Even before the Great Leap Forward in the East, scientists in the West were massively expanding yields with a Green Revolution based on nitrogen-and phosphate-based fertilizers, insecticides, mechanization, irrigation, and hybridization. As a species, we soon came to depend on these fertility stimulants. More than half the world’s population is now being fed by the extra production from technology and nitrate inputs rather than land expansion.
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China was the new frontier for biotechnology. With a fifth of the world’s population to feed on a tenth of the planet’s arable land, the temptations of biotechnology had always been enormous. Urbanization and industrialization add to the pressures by taking land for factories, roads, and housing blocks.
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With the population expanding and appetites growing, China faced an uphill struggle to feed itself. As the economist Vaclav Smil noted: “All of the world’s grain exports together would fill less than two-thirds of the country’s projected demand for food.”
¹⁰

Desperate measures were needed to boost agricultural output, but there had been no big productivity breakthroughs for fifty years on the scale of the Green Revolution. Efficiency was made an overriding priority. The result was fields and fields of monotonous monoculture.

On the new motorway from the holy mountain Taishan to the experimental agriculture center at Linyi, I had a feeling of déjà vu. The landscape looked
remarkably familiar, though I had never been this way before. Staring at flat brown fields, hazy gray skies, and row after shallow row of uniformly spindly poplar trees was like watching a minute-long clip on a daylong loop. It reminded me of the countryside in Henan, Hebei, and Beijing. On the North China plain, which stretches about 1,000 kilometers from the capital down to the Yangtze, you could travel for hours without feeling any sense of progress because every road looked the same. I used to think this was just because it was flat but then I met Mother Poplar.

That was the media nickname for Zhang Qiwen, the genetics professor who was arguably responsible for changing a bigger chunk of the Chinese landscape than the emperors and engineers behind the Great Wall, the Three Gorges Dam, or the Sky Train railway to Tibet.

In 1980, soon after China opened up to the outside world, Zhang established the nation’s first poplar gene pool by importing hybrid seeds and saplings from Canada, the United States, and Italy. She embraced biotechnology with the gusto of a new convert and applied it with the single-minded utilitarianism of an old Maoist. The result was the spread of a now ubiquitous, lanky hybrid of the American
Populus deltoides
and European
Populus nigra,
aka Poplar Hybrid 107.

Developed in Italy more than ten years earlier, this hybrid and its near twin PH108 had failed to take root in most global forestry markets,
¹¹
but in northern China, thanks to Zhang, they came to dominate the landscape more than any subspecies of plant at any time in recorded history.

More than 1.5 billion were planted in just five years, covering a fifth of China’s entire forest area. Yet almost all of them were squeezed along roadsides in the crowded North China plains.
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As a result, from Liaoning in the north down to the Yangtze in the south, this single hybrid is everywhere. There are few more fitting symbols of modern monocultural civilization.

These endless lines of leaves on sticks are the twenty-first century’s superefficient substitute for the ancient forests.
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Imported, artificial, with a sparse canopy and a slender trunk, PH107 was designed for rapid growth without a thought for the wider environment. When Zhang came across PH107, it was love at first sight. The poplar is the cow of the tree world: quick to bulk up and easy to cut down. In China, it is bred for humans, mainly for industrial use or as a protective barrier for crop fields. In ideal conditions—supplied with lots of fertilizer and pesticide—it grows
3 meters a year in height and up to 4 centimeters in diameter, providing 60 percent more wood than a wild poplar.

“It’s about production, not ecology,” explained Zhang, a robust and kindly woman in a red poppy-patterned cardigan. Though retired, she retained something of the war-against-nature spirit of the Great Leap Forward. When I asked how the narrow canopies affected bird-nesting patterns, she laughed. “I have never thought about it.”

A query about cloning and testing techniques provoked a graphic analogy.

“Compare it to a baby. Imagine you [she pointed to me] have ten children with you [she pointed to my horrified assistant]. We choose the best one, chop off its arms and legs, then cut the torso into ten pieces, and plant them in the ground. They should grow up as identical clones, which we then measure as they grow in different conditions.”

I’m pretty sure she was referring to branches and trunks when she talked about limbs and torsos, but the language was indicative of a recklessness toward ecosystems and gender balance.

Tree and crop modification has a long history. In China, the ability to bend plants to man’s will was seen by the ancients as a mark of civilization.
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In the modern age, the United States and Europe blazed the trail of hybridization. Professor Zhang simply picked what she considered to be the best of the best. Her selection made her a national hero. On her wall was a group photograph with President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao. Mother Poplar was also often lauded in the state media.

PH107 has many good qualities. Poplars absorb more carbon than slower-growing trees, so they can help to tackle global warming. Their cultivation has eased China’s reliance on wood from illegally felled forests in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and Russia.
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In smaller numbers, the trees might even be considered attractive.

But their numbers are far from small. The domination of these twin female trees is not just an affront to Taoist ideals of balance and fengshui aesthetics, it is of dubious long-term economic benefit. Although the hybrids grow fast, they are sickly plants, vulnerable to disease and unable to reproduce. Most are cut down after six years, almost as soon as they start to flower and show other signs of reaching sexual maturity. Zhang described pollen as a form of pollution.

The techniques of modern forestry are no less degrading than the animal husbandry techniques used on giant pandas. This is not wholly
China’s fault, but once again it has taken a global trend to a new extreme. Zhang was simply trying to help her country. She told me she was proud of putting poplars across northern China. But I was horrified at the consequences of her work. PH107 cultivation denied sex, destroyed beauty, and replaced local diversity with a superefficient standard.
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In that final narrow sense alone, PH107 might be considered a good thing. But you could have too much of a good thing.

Zhang was old-school. Trained at the height of the Great Leap Forward, she had wedded Maoist recklessness to Western science to conceive an ugly, superabundant hybrid. But, like the megadams of Sichuan, the wisdom of this approach has subsequently been questioned. A new generation of agricultural scientists is warning that the overcultivation of one efficient crop could result in the choking of everything else.

Professor Jiang Gaoming is one of them. He is a man of the Shandong soil who has grown into an eco-farming evangelist. We met at a banquet, where a relay of genetic engineering professors took it in turns to down glasses of baijiu rice liquor with me, the solitary foreign journalist. Moonfaced and jocular, Jiang joined in with the drinking and the card games that followed, but though he might make small talk with them, his views are utterly at odds with most of the agriculture scientists at his institute.

The next morning, as he drove me to a pilot project along roads lined with PH107, he spoke with passion of his love for his home province and his fury at modern agricultural practices that he believes are destroying the soil and ruining the landscape.

“Everyone in China needs money. They don’t care about biodiversity and the environment. A few of us in the science community care because it is our subject, but the government pays little heed. For them, a tree is just a tree.”

He railed against chemical fertilizers, pesticides, genetically modified crops, and the plastic sheeting that is spread across the land to trap moisture and heat for the cultivation of garlic. These modern techniques were a form of pollution, he said, that was sucking nutrient-rich, dark carbon out of the soil and turning the land pale. He sympathized with farmers who would do anything to increase yields, but he could not forgive agribusiness and its advocates in global corporations and local government.

“Shandong is number one in China for agricultural production, but this is also where you see the most problems,” he said. “Farmers used to be honest. If food was bad, they would withhold it from the market. But now they don’t care. They just want to make money. They see the income gap between the city and the countryside and they will do anything to catch up. But though they make poor-quality food for sale, they never eat it themselves.”

He said Chinese farmers use twice as much fertilizer and insecticide per hectare as their American counterparts.
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Despite the health risks, they add arsenic to artificially boost crop yields and melamine to disguise the low level of protein in milk.
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In the seed market, there were fewer and fewer subtypes because everyone bought the same few high-yield varieties. The same was true of poultry. The tasty native Shouguang chicken had been crossbred with a chunkier U.S. species to increase meat volume, but Jiang said the hybrid was only for supermarkets. None of the farmers want to eat this tasteless lab meat themselves. In a world of mass production, too much of a good thing quickly became bad. The obvious antidote was to make something bad good. For Jiang, that meant making better use of what we normally waste: stalks, husks, and manure.

The fresh rich stink of cow dung assaulted the nostrils at Professor Jiang’s eco-farming pilot project in Jiangjiazhuang Village. Cornstalks—usually burned or discarded—were bagged up alongside the road for winter fodder. Inside the building, straw matting was spread across bunk beds. Outside, thousands of insects hopped back and forth across a grasshopper breeding pen. “Very nutritious. We’ll try some later,” said the professor.