When a Billion Chinese Jump (47 page)

The exception was former vice minister of forestry Dong Zhiyong, who told me with unusual candor that the bureaucrats running the ministry
had little awareness of the need for biodiversity, even though they were in charge of most of the country’s nature reserves. The only reason they have turned to conservation, he said, was because they had no alternative: “We’re in a situation where we have no wood to cut. None of the forests are mature enough.”

The creation of many nature reserves was heavily influenced by international organizations, such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the World Wide Fund for Nature, which were allowed to send delegations to China during the period of opening that followed Mao’s death in 1976. Among the first to make contact with them was Wang Song, a zoologist by training who later went on to compile the first Red List of the country’s endangered species.
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Now retired, Wang recalled the unease among many government officials in those early days. “Some said it was too early to work with the international community, that our conservation systems were too weak. But I said no way. We must hurry. Even then, I knew that China overused wildlife for everything, that people would kill anything for foreign currency.”

Since then, progress has been far slower than he would like. “It is a shame. We are much improved, but there is no way to change in one generation. Our country has a long history of overusing wildlife.”

Wang bemoaned the loss of forest in Heilongjiang. The plantations of small trees that replaced the old-growth forests were, he said sadly, not the same at all. “A human life is just a fraction of a second in terms of the planet’s history, but in my short time I have seen huge changes. I have clearly seen the virgin forest cleared. There are just a few small reserves left. Even now, nobody thinks about restoration of natural ecosystems.”

He was encouraged by the increasing willingness of senior officials to discuss the subject. Compared with the past, he said, China had the money for conservation. But the talk and the cash had yet to be translated into action to reverse the devastating changes to China’s ecology since the 1950s.

Wang advocates natural regeneration, letting damaged ecosystems recover by themselves. But policymakers prefer engineering projects and big reforestation schemes. With little public understanding of the importance of biodiversity, Wang feared conservation could become an empty fad: “China is very clever. We very quickly pick up foreign terms like ecotourism and eco-food. But it is mostly nonsense. Look at the Chinese
papers. They always write about ‘ecological construction.’ The word construction means you can do anything you want. We tried to change it to ecological restoration, but nobody would accept this.”

When I looked out over Tangwanghe the next morning, it resembled a depressed industrial landscape more than a new national park. Coal smoke poured from hundreds of small household chimneys and a handful of industrial stacks. A shallow haze obscured distant trees. Every minute or so, a three-wheeler taxi or truck stacked with timber blundered through the otherwise quiet, white roads. Logging evidently remained the main source of income for the 40,000 residents of this frontier town, which was carved out of virgin forest in that epic year of 1958.

We crossed the road for a breakfast of gruel and
baozi
at a small restaurant and got talking to the owner, a middle-aged woman, whose parents moved to Tangwanghe when it opened up during the Great Leap Forward. Perhaps a little insensitively, I asked why they came to such a cold and remote place. An old man at a nearby table interrupted: “There was good money to be made here from logging up until about thirty years ago. Then we fell behind the rest of the country.” In the early days, the town had been praised by Deng Xiaoping as a model of sustainable forestry because locals planted saplings over the same area that they clear-cut. But the trade-off was unequal. The new trees, mostly white birch and larch, were a poor replacement for the old Korean pines.

The old man told me he continued to cut trees, though there were far fewer than in the past. “It only takes a few minutes with a chainsaw or half an hour by hand.”

Tangwanghe is supposed to be an example of smart top-down conservation.
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Unlike nature reserves, which are often too poorly funded to be effective in protecting flora and fauna, the national park is supposed to generate tourist income to pay for strong management.
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But the problem is that the area was chosen as a national park not because of its rich ecology but because of its collapsed economy. The nearest municipality of Yichun was classified in 2008 as one of China’s twelve “resource-depleted cities,” an evocative term that demonstrates how the unsustainable extraction of timber and other resources has left many communities without livelihoods.

The town’s young tourist chief, Ma Shengli, drove us to the Stone Forest, explaining on the way that 99.8 percent of the park was forested, albeit with mostly secondary growth. “It is just a trial project. We are pioneers. The idea is to protect the ecosystem on a large scale, develop seven tourist sites, and to help local people get rich,” he explained.

We stopped and trudged through the snowy forest, which was predominantly made up of slim young white birch and dragon spruce. There were a small number of old, broad Korean pines, though Ma explained they were usually those with gnarled trunks that were not considered good enough to cut down. It brought to mind my visit to Shangri-La, and Zhuangzi’s story of “useless trees” outlasting better-looking specimens. The park had established a sponsorship system for the fortunate if ugly survivors. For 100 yuan, visitors could have their names pinned to a protected tree, some of which were more than 400 years old.

Ma told me there were bears, boar, foxes, and deer deeper in the forest, though I saw no trace of them. The absence of any animal tracks was perhaps unsurprising in the depths of winter, but, apart from a few small birds, the forest was eerily quiet.

Short of wildlife, the park’s managers decided their best selling point was unusual granite formations. The building-sized geological formations were unlikely to ever challenge the majesty of the Grand Canyon, but their poetic names were in keeping with a long Chinese tradition of using the imagination to amplify nature. Wandering around the “Kissing Boulders,” “Sliver of Sky,” “Drunken Tortoise,” and “Pine Teasing Golden Toad” made for a pleasant walk, and the views from the hilltops, even of secondary forest, were breathtaking.

But under the forest canopies, the variety of life was diminishing. John MacKinnon, the head of the EU-China Biodiversity Programme, told me China plants more trees than the rest of the world combined. “But the trouble is they tend to be monoculture plantations. They are not places where birds want to live.” The World Bank advised China to concentrate more on quality than quantity of its forests.

China’s woodlands have been emptied by decades of overhunting, foliage cutting, and excess harvesting of wild plants and fungi.
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The protection of the military and the powers of the one-party state have not been applied with enough gusto to prevent a decimation of many species.

At the top of the food chain, the world’s biggest tiger, the Amur tiger,
also known as the Siberian or North China tiger, had been hunted close to extinction because of its value in traditional Chinese medicine.
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Lower down, the Heilongjiang frog and Northeast China frog were also on the verge of being wiped out because their estrogen is a traditional treatment for fatigue, improving the memory, and strengthening the kidney.
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The Great Northern Wilderness was becoming the land of dead rivers and hollow forests.

Changbaishan was perhaps the most notorious example. This forest in Jilin, on the border with North Korea, was once one of the most bio-rich places in northern China, home to over fifty species of mammals, including the Amur tiger, sika deer, goral, sable, and black bear, as well as 200 species of birds. This was the subject of one of China’s first and most influential studies of the economic value of an ecosystem.
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International recognition came in 1980, when UNESCO named Changbaishan as a world’s biosphere reserve with a declared ecological inventory of 2,277 plants and 1,225 animal species.

The UN body appears to have been the victim of environmental fraud. In 2008, local biologists said they had been ordered to exaggerate wildlife numbers because the real figures were so low they would hurt the image of the nature reserve.
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Visiting scientists found almost no animal tracks in the park. Feng Yongfeng, one of China’s most influential environmental reporters, put it more succinctly: Changbaishan, he told me, is an “empty forest.”

The following day, we penetrated deeper into Xiaoxingan to visit a logging camp outside the national park. It was a two-hour drive by bus and then car along a rutted, icy road. The forests were full of felled trees, timber yards lined the roadside, logging trucks added to the traffic, and most of the people we met were cutting, trading, or processing wood. On the bus, a timber merchant offered to show us around. I was grateful for her kindness, but it turned out she had ulterior motives. After calling her husband to explain she would be late home because of a foreign guest, the pretty middle-aged woman hooked up with a young boyfriend. They got friendly in the back of the car as we drove from lumberyard to tree farm.

Finding the lumberjacks was not easy. We stopped every few hundred
meters to listen for the buzz of a chain saw, but by the time we caught up with the loggers they had already felled the day’s quota of trees and were loading them onto a truck as the snow fell around them. Four men were needed to carry a single trunk of white birch. They lifted in pairs, two at the front, two at the rear, poles across their shoulders tied to steel hooks that bit into the logs as they walked up a pair of parallel planks to the top of the truck.

Their leader, Hou Zhengkuan, gave directions and adjusted loads to ensure the truck was stable. Between logs, he told me incomes had fallen along with production over the previous five years. Now that it was forbidden to fell Korean pines, earnings came almost entirely from the low-quality white birch, which was used for pulp, ice-cream sticks, firewood, matches, plywood, and furniture. He earned 1,800 yuan a month. This was a decline from five years earlier when he was cutting higher-value timber. “The forests are declining in volume. There is less and less wood,” he said.

It is the same everywhere in China. Now that the Korean pine has been decimated, most of the trees in the forest are Dahurian larch, which reaches maturity after a hundred years, and fast-growing white birch, which mature in just forty years.
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But even these species have been logged close to unsustainable levels.

Hou shrugged at the way things had turned out. “After fifty years of cutting, the forests have declined.” Loggers, he said, chopped 95 percent less wood than when he started. We next went to see the ultimate diminution of the forests: a small, mist-shrouded factory where huge tree trunks were splintered into 5-centimeter toothpicks. The process was primitively simple. At one end of the workshop, thick logs were peeled. At the other they were diced into thin strips. The transformation was completed along the length of a conveyor belt. The belt was only five meters or so long, but the air was so thick with humidity I could not see one end from the other.

Moisture was the key to the process. The birch had to be thoroughly soaked before it could be stripped and sliced. It was then wrung like a wet rag, filling the air with droplets and turning the factory into a cool sauna.

In the mist, laborers appeared and disappeared like wraiths as they fetched fresh logs, hewed off the bark, then pierced either end of the bare wood with spikes ready for the machine.

Swollen with water, the logs were easily peeled by automated blades,
then pressed flat and squeezed dry by a thunderously juddering mangle. Dozens of rings, each representing a year of growth, were unraveled in seconds. A tree was consumed every five minutes.

The clanking machine is like a calculator, doing addition and multiplication for mankind but only subtraction and division for the natural environment. Output—production and profits—are positive. The owner drives a luxury car. Billions of teeth around the world have been picked with the carefully crafted splinters he produces. The input, on the other hand, is entirely negative. Over twenty years, the two workshops in this factory have shredded close to a million trees.

And this is just one tiny old factory that employs a couple of dozen people and cheap, outdated equipment. Multiply that by several thousand and a picture emerges of how much wood is being consumed by China’s paper mills, flooring firms, furniture workshops, construction companies, and chopstick makers.
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Consumption of printing and writing paper have more than doubled since 1995. Hardwood floorings are increasingly popular. China has become the biggest user of pulp and timber in the world. No wonder the factory manager was finding wood harder to come by and more expensive.

The higher prices were inevitable because the government’s toughness applied only to suppliers. When it came to consumers, the authoritarian tiger turned into a pussycat. Despite the 1998 logging ban, wood consumption continued to surge along with the growing economy. With China’s forests unable to meet demand, buyers had to look to other nations for supplies. From Heilongjiang they did not have to go far.

We drove four hours east to the Heilong Jiang or Black Dragon River,
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which marks the border with Russia and gives China’s northernmost province its name. The water was frozen and gnarled into chunks. On the Chinese bank, several large ships were iced into their berths for the winter. On the Russian side, wisps of smoke curled up from the chimneys of a small settlement. In the middle of the icy expanse a military checkpoint sat on the territorial dividing line. Apart from a single border guard sweeping snow in front of the passport control barrier and a fisherman hacking a hole in the ice, there was not a soul in sight. The Black Dragon was hibernating.