When a Billion Chinese Jump (43 page)

Jiang described his goal as a new Green Revolution, but it was essentially a return to fundamentals. The son of local farmers, he was raised in this village and had watched with horror what modern farming techniques had done to agriculture. He was trying to find an alternative to fertilizer and, encouragingly, the government was willing to fund him. Cue manure, the ultimate wasted resource. China produces more than three times more excrement than solid waste.
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Most of it flows into rivers and seas, creating a nutrient feast for plankton and algae. Plans are afoot to change this. The government aimed to have fifty million homes using biogas by 2010, some of which would be fueled by animal droppings.
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For Jiang, better use of agricultural waste was the best way to ease the problems of global warming and food shortages. He was a manure messiah,
a stalk savior who wanted to plow postharvest stubble back into the land rather than burning it and releasing more carbon into the air, as I had seen farmers do in Henan.

“More than half of a plant’s photosynthetic carbohydrates are in stalks and leaves. If we use them better, we can ease global warming and make the soil richer,” Jiang said with infectious enthusiasm.

He bounced around his walled farm, expressing a childlike joy in the rich, black, plastic-free soil. “Look how big and red these radishes grow with organic fertilizer,” he beamed, stooping to pull one up. “And these chili peppers. We get a higher yield with our natural methods than the farmers outside do with agrichemicals.” Most vegetables, he admitted, did not grow as fast or as abundantly as they would with the application of nonorganic fertilizer and pesticide, but the difference was small, the quality was higher and, properly licensed, they fetched a higher price in the market because they were safer.
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Greenies around the world have been saying much the same thing for years. Jiang reminded me of the jolly, idealistic character played by Richard Briers in the 1970s British TV grow-your-own sitcom
The Good Life,
but instead of an organic garden in a suburban semi, he wanted to introduce eco-farming on a China-wide scale. The aim of the project, he said, was to restore the land to how he remembered it as a child. Essentially, he was trying to re-create a lost paradise with science, government funding, the political backing of the Communist Party, and copious quantities of manure.

There are precedents. The importance of excrement has been extolled in both ancient lore and communist propaganda. Zhuangzi, the most down-to-earth of the Taoist philosophers, held it in high regard. Asked where to find Tao (The Way), he replied, “Dao zai shiniao” (Tao is found in the shit and piss). For Confucians in the thirteenth century, a son’s willingness to taste his father’s excrement was extolled as a sign of great filial piety. In one famous moral fable, a child discovers his father has a health problem because his turds are sweet.
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In the twentieth century, at the height of the Great Leap Forward, the model soldier Lei Feng collected the most idealized pile of manure in China’s history. As the propaganda legend has it, Lei was so moved by the proceedings of the 8th Plenary of the Chinese Communist Party’s Eighth Central Committee that he felt compelled to contribute 500 pounds of manure to the Liaoning People’s
Commune. Based on the dung shoveling and numerous other cleaner good deeds by the model soldier, Mao declared in 1963 a “Learn from Lei Feng campaign” for the entire nation.
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More recently, though, dung has become symbolic of the great rural-urban divide. In the countryside, close to the soil, it is a free boon for growth, but in the concrete environment of the city it is a smelly curse that is expensive to dispose of. If biogas takes off, it won’t be in the city.

The changing mores of modern China were apparent as we wandered around the eco-model village. Several homes had been fitted with solar panels on the roofs to heat bathwater, and biogas chambers underground that piped fuel converted from human waste, animal manure, and compost to stoves and lightbulbs. The night soil was collected on an individual rather than a communal basis. Each of the newly fitted homes had its own toilet, a big step up from the shared public facilities of the past. The trend is apparent nationwide: a nation’s social change mapped through its toilet habits. When China was poor and genuinely communist, whole communities squatted side by side in public latrines. Today, however, some are reluctant even to share a seat with their own families. I was astonished to see at one luxury housing compound a five-bedroom home with seven toilets—one per person plus spares for guests and housekeepers. Such developments proclaim more viscerally than any political statement the death of communist values.

Jiang did not care where the night soil came from so long as it could be used efficiently. But villagers were not easily persuaded that it could replace conventional modern power and fertilizer. The new system was imperfect. There was a problem with a bio-powered light, and the gas retained an underlying odor that betrayed its origin. A bigger problem was money. Because the government subsidized biofuel, people accepted it. But there were few takers for the stalk-and-manure alternative to fertilizer that Jiang advocated.

The average Linyi farmer, living on an income of 4,000 yuan per year, could not afford to be a purist. They had seen insecticides, chemical fertilizers, hybridized plants, and growth hormones make the difference between starvation and food security within two generations.

Everyone we met in the village shared the professor’s family name.
Jiang Su, a farmer and mother, proudly showed off the strong flame from her biogas cooker and the four grunting pigs that provided most of the fuel for it. Jiang Jun, the dour local Communist Party secretary, sat under a poster of Mao and explained that the village, which got its first telephone only in the late 1980s, soon planned to be one of the first in the country to install biogas streetlamps. Jiang Huixuan, an elderly peanut farmer, used to beg in the streets of Qingdao as a child, but now praised chemical fertilizer and plastic field-sheeting for improving living standards.

Most memorable, though, was Jiang Zhoushi, a baijiu-drinking, chain-smoking 104-year-old who puffed her way through almost an entire packet of cigarettes in our half-hour interview. If there is a set of survival genes, Jiang Zoushi must have had the lot.
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She had lived through several famines, Western colonialism, Japanese occupation, civil war, murderous political campaigns, and eviction by a daughter-in-law during an antirightist movement. In the fight against Japan, her husband had been responsible for shooting local collaborators. During the famine of 1928, she had fought with neighbors to eat the last pieces of bark left on a tree. At that time, she said, she became an unwitting cannibal: “Someone sold us pork soup, but I found a little human finger in it. I knew very well it was from a baby.”
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No matter which Jiang we met, the refrain was the same: “Life is much better now,” or a variation on the theme. Though the professor was trying to wean locals off chemical fertilizers, people were reluctant to give them up. As far as they were concerned, the agrichemicals had kept hunger at bay for more than three decades.

The night before we left, the professor arranged an organic feast. It was an act of hospitality for me and two of his French students, but it was also a propaganda activity aimed at the local Communist Party leadership. He had invited the township chief and other senior cadres to give them a first taste of naturally grown food. The vegetables, all picked from the farm, took longer to cook than expected. The important guests milled around impatiently as chairs were fetched. After thirty minutes the food arrived. It was indeed a feast of more than a dozen dishes, including eggplants, carrots, leeks, radishes, and chicken soup. But the officials picked at it. By their criteria, I guess this was poor fare. At official banquets in China, guests were usually treated to huge quantities of meat and exotic dishes,
both signs of how wealthy the host was and how far the country has come from an era in which families considered themselves fortunate to have pork once a year at spring festival.

Baijiu, the fallback spirit reviver, failed to lift the mood, and the conversation remained at the level of formal speeches and polite noises about the food. We toasted each other, drank, toasted again, and drank some more. Between the gulps of throat-burning baijiu, the conversation spluttered along until Professor Jiang produced a bowl of crispy fried grasshoppers. “Just picked from outside,” the ebullient host smiled. “Won’t you try one?” For a brief moment, insect crunching became a spectator sport with all eyes on the foreigners. It was a consumption dare, like the endless rounds of baijiu. When it was my turn, I paused, took a look at my snack, wondered briefly if I had seen it jumping around earlier in the day, then crunched it between my teeth. It went very well with the organic rice. “Delicious. Can I have some more?”

Despite the taciturnity of the party secretary, Jiang was determined that we should all leave on a high. “Bring your chairs outside. The moon is very beautiful and you can see the stars. There’s no pollution here,” he said, beaming. “Let’s sing some songs.” The cadres seemed eager to leave, but there was no escaping Jiang’s enthusiasm. We sat. They stood. We sang. They loitered close to their car. Jiang had a fine tenor voice as he crooned “My Hometown Yimeng Mountain,” a heartfelt song of praise to the beautiful scenery of Linyi and its abundant crops. When he was done, the French students and I clapped enthusiastically. Even the cadres smiled. It was their excuse to head home.

Why should they be enthusiastic about organic methods? The long-term impact of chemical fertilizers on soil remains fiercely contested throughout the world, hardly surprising given its importance to global food supplies.
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But there is strong evidence that the soil quality is declining.
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Depleted of natural fertility and innate virility, the intercourse between humankind and the ecosystem has to be chemically assisted. Humanity relies more and more on artificial stimulants. Effectively we are pumping the land with agricultural Viagra.

Government officials insist they are not worried about food shortages, though Premier Wen Jiabao has privately asked senior former officials to search for new areas to cultivate.
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There are other good reasons too for exploring alternatives to chemical fertilizers. They pollute waterways, add
massively to greenhouse gas emissions, and rely heavily on oil, supplies of which will become increasingly unstable as the earth approaches the peak of supply.
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Hydrocarbon inputs have been a crucial element of the Green Revolution that has ramped up agricultural production over the past sixty years. We might not actually eat coal as the Meng brothers did while trapped underground, but we all indirectly consume fossil fuels for food. Oil and coal provide the fuel for fertilizer factories, phosphate extraction equipment, tractors, and distribution networks. The Green Revolution has enabled farmland to produce trillions of extra calories in energy, but the surge in food prices in 2008 suggests the return on technology and chemical inputs may be diminishing. This was the expectation of the author of
Who Will Feed China?,
Earthwatch’s Lester Brown: “We are reaching the limits of what plants can do. Plants are not that different from people in this sense,” he says. “You can get gains up to a point and then it becomes much more difficult—I don’t know of any scientists who are predicting potential advances in grain yields that are comparable with those we saw in the last half century.”
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Like the poplar, our species is in danger of becoming too successful. By boosting plant yields with nitrates and other fertilizers, human beings have siphoned off almost 40 percent of all land-based photosynthetic capability.
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Given how much of the planet’s energy we are hogging, it is inevitable that other species are declining. The same is true in water systems, where the balance of life is changing due to the runoff of fertility stimulants that mankind pumps into the earth.

My next port of call was the coast. Even the oceans are struggling to meet the demand for food and dilution of waste. The following morning we bade farewell to Jiang and headed off on a four-hour bus ride to Qingdao, a center for oceanic research, fisheries, and beer. This pleasant maritime city of 8 million people sits on the southeastern coast of Shandong. As we arrived, the legacy of the former German treaty port was evident in the Bavarian architecture, the Tsingtao brewery, and the annual beer festival. But the city was moving on with a massive seafront expansion of office blocks and residential towers. Cranes were as thick on the horizon here as anywhere.

Enjoying a crisp coastal breeze, I walked over to the Institute of Oceanology, China’s leading marine research organization. The boffins here are a friendly bunch with a worrying message: pollutants are building up in the oceans. More contaminants are coming from farms than factories. As a result, Professor Zhou Mingjiang, the former head of the institute, believes the main threat to China’s coastal waters is not from heavy metal but from featherlight algae.

Algae are an ancient friend and a new threat. These organisms date back far longer than humanity, almost to the beginning of life on earth. They appear naturally, particularly in the summer when the sea is warm, and could be a source of nutrition for fish and man. But growth patterns have changed. New forms of algae have evolved. Most worryingly, bright green and red blooms are breaking out like nasty rashes across a widening area of lakes and coastlines.

Scientists believe the algae have been stimulated by the sharp rise in nitrates and phosphates in coastal waters as a result of farm fertilizer runoff, untreated human waste, and the food used to stimulate the growth of fish and crabs in aquaculture. This has resulted in an alarming increase of red tides, a manifestation of toxic algae blooms that poison other marine life, choke oxygen from the water, and block the gills of fish.