When a Billion Chinese Jump (55 page)

Among the journalists and conservationists who have provided time or insight are Chen Guidi, Dai Qing, Feng Yongfeng, Jessy Lee, Sarah Liang, Ma Jun, Nie Bei, Tang Xiyang, Wang Yongchen, Wu Chuntao, Wu Dengming, Yang Yongping, Yu Xiaogang, and Zhang Jicheng. I would like to express respect too for the courage of lawyers such as Teng Biao and Gao Zhisheng, and citizen activists such as Chen Guangcheng, Hou Wenzhuo, Hu Jia, Liu Xiaobo, and Zeng Jinyan, who campaign on sensitive issues, including the environment, and have sometimes suffered violent retribution or imprisonment by the authorities.

I would not have made it to the end without the support and understanding of my wife and daughters in Beijing and the words of encouragement from
my mother, sister, and stepfather on the other side of the world. Many friends shared warmth, wisdom, or much-needed mickey-taking, but I am particularly grateful to Nick Bonner, Andy Brock, Chen Ying, Jocelyn Ford, Kristen McQuillin, Sumiko Okita, Qin Liwen, Gareth Richards, Wang Chunhui, Wang Xiaoshan, and Yoyo Yoshiko. Special thanks to Murray Sayle, a master of the foreign correspondent’s craft, whose essay “Overloading Emoh Ruo” was an inspiration for this book.

Finally, how can I express sufficient gratitude to those who have provided so much fine research and warm companionship over these years? One of the privileges of being a correspondent in China has been working with talented assistants, whose insight, sensitivity, and humor have added enormously to the pleasure and profit of traveling this vast country. Jin Jian, Zhou Xingping, Huang Lisha, Chen Shi, Chen Ou, Chang Yiru, Yu Hongyan, Xuyang Jingjing, and Cui Zheng know best that these pages would not be the same without their interpretation, and that for big chunks of the narrative, the “I” ought really to be “we.”

I am in debt to them, to the others named above, and the many other friends and sources I have not mentioned, but whose help has made this book feel, at times, like a collaborative “cloud” project more than an individual work. I take sole responsibility for the interpretation and personal polemic, but ultimately it is cooperation and a shared acceptance of “facts” that moves people. To all those who have contributed, thank you.

1.
At the time, the population of China had just passed 900 million. Today, it is close to 1.4 billion.

2.
There are at least two other equally apocalyptic versions of this story that suggest the consequence of the synchronized jump would be a tsunami or an earthquake that would kill everyone on the planet. All of them may be bastardizations of the apocryphal quote attributed to Napoleon: “Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world.”

3.
Wei Yiming et al., China Energy Report (2008): CO
₂
Emissions Research
(Science Press, 2008). The U.S. Energy Information Administration and the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center noted an increase of more than 30 percent between 2003 and 2005.

1.
Found at Ana village, Chuxiong Prefecture (Xu Jianchu and Jesse Ribot, “Decentralisation and Accountability in Forest Management: A Case from Yunnan, Southwest China.”
European Journal of Development Research
16, 1 [spring 2004]).

2.
Chen paid the local authorities to clear up the mess, but neither he nor they bothered about the consequences until Chinese journalists revealed that the great director had turned the lake into a dump site. He was fined 90,000 yuan and publicly apologized for his negligence. Local officials were reprimanded, the lake was cleaned up and, two years later, the government banned filmmaking and artistic performances in most nature reserves.

3.
Rock’s influence may be overstated. Hilton said he studied the essays of the French missionary Abbé Évariste-Régis Huc, whose version of the myth of Shambala located it somewhere north of the Kunlun mountain range between Altai and Tian Shan. This would put it close to the border between current-day Qinghai and Xinjiang, hundreds of miles from Yunnan. But that has not stopped many other areas from attempting to appropriate the lucrative name (Michael McRae,
The Siege of Shangri-La: The Quest for Tibet’s Legendary Hidden Paradise
[Broadway Books, 2002], pp. 84–86).

4.
Renamed Camp David by President Eisenhower in 1955.

5.
Ashild Kolas,
Tourism and Tibetan Culture in Transition: A Place Called Shangri-La
(Routledge, 2007).

6.
That year, an earthquake struck the area, killing two hundred people and putting the city’s unique architectural heritage into the international spotlight. Soon after, Lijiang was granted UNESCO World Heritage status.

7.
The trend is provincewide. In 2007, Yunnan province received 4.6 million overseas tourists and 89.9 million domestic tourists (China National Bureau of Statistics).

8.
Kolas,
Tourism and Tibetan Culture,
details how the Diqing government’s tourist office lobbied for the renaming of Zhongdian in late 1996 by inviting a “search party” commissioned by the Yunnan Economy and Technology Research Center to find evidence backing their claims. The party comprised more than forty academics, including experts in the fields of ethnology, literature, religion, linguistics, geography, and Tibetology. The government persuaded the Diqing Prefecture Tibetan Studies Center to assert that Xianggelila (Shangri-La) was a transliteration of
sems kyi nyima zlawa
(sun and moon of the heart)—a phrase in the local dialect used as a metaphor for perfection in the Bon culture.

9.
Logging would probably have been halted anyway because the state banned tree felling in many areas after the floods of 1998 were blamed on deforestation.

10.
A year after Xianggelila was renamed, labor teams began construction of a new airport and the tourists surged in. Between 1995 and 2010, the number of visitors increased 400-fold to three million, according to Zhongdian tourist authorities. (Interview with the head of the Zhongdian tourist board.)

11.
This view was best expressed by Ye Xiaowen, the head of China Administration of Religious Affairs, who pointed out that central government spending was raising living standards more than the dreamy romanticism of the West.
He concluded: “Life expectancy was 35.5 years, but now it has reached 67 years. This is the real ‘Shangri-La’” (Ye Xiaowen, “Shangri-La Has Changed and Tibetans Know It,”
China Daily,
December 8, 2008).

12.
He was later jailed for his idealism. This is discussed in more detail in
ch. 16
.

13.
Yu’s ideas are outlined in more detail in
ch. 13
.

14.
Elizabeth Economy,
The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China’s Future
(Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. 30–31.

15.
Sam Crane provided this definition of
ziran
, which includes a translation by David Hinton. A far more recent variation is
daziran
—or “big
ziran
”—which is often used in a similar way to the Western idea of “Mother Nature,” according to the China hand Sidney Rittenberg. The concepts of
tian
and
ziran
are fundamental to early philosophical debate in China.

16.
Zhuangzi tells the story of a lost paradise as follows:

I have also heard that in ancient times when beasts outnumbered men, people had to build their dwellings in trees in order to avoid them. By day, they would pick acorns and chestnuts; at night they would sleep in the trees. Hence, they were called the “nest people,” meaning people living in the nests. In ancient times, people did not know the use of clothes as they collected firewood in summer and burnt it in winter to keep themselves warm. Hence, they were referred to as “people who knew how to survive.” During Shennong’s reign, people went to bed with a peaceful mind and got up free and easy. They did not know their fathers but only knew their mothers. Living side by side with elk and deer, they farmed and wove for themselves and nursed no ill will against others. This was an age when virtue reached its peak.

Thereafter, the Yellow Emperor ruined virtue by his fights with Chiuyou in Zhuolu, with blood flowing a hundred li. When King Shun and King Yao ascended the throne, numerous official posts were established. King Tang exiled his lord and King Wu destroyed the preceding dynasty. Ever since then, the strong have been bullying the weak; the many have become the prey to the few. Ever since King Tang and King Wu, all monarchs have been usurpers who bring disorder to the people (Zhuangzi, trans. Wang Rongpei,
Library of Chinese Classics,
vol. 2 [Hunan People’s Publishing House, 1999], ch. 29, pp. 517–19).

17.
The ideal baseline was called the “fundamental norm.” Mankind followed the concept of
wuwei
(noninterference by human intelligence) so everything was done in the interests of creation and the constancy of nature.

18.
Cited in Roger Ames,
The Art of Rulership: A Study of Ancient Chinese Political Thought
(University of Hawaii Press, 1983), pp. 201–2.

19.
Liu is also commonly credited as the originator of tai chi and soy milk.

20.
Randall Collins,
The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change
(Social Science, 2000), p. 157.

21.
Activism was frowned upon, except by the Chimei (lit. “Red Eyebrows”), a contemporary agrarian rebel group sometimes described as the forerunner of secret societies and underworld gangs such as the Triads.

22.
Mark Elvin,
Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China
(Yale University Press, 2004).

23.
Ibid., p. 9.

24.
Interview with John MacKinnon, head of the EU-China Biodiversity Programme and one of the most experienced foreign zoologists working in China.

25.
Yuming Yang, Kun Tian, Jiming Hao, Shengji Pei, and Yongxing Yang, “Bio-diversity and Biodiversity Conservation in Yunnan, China,”
Biodiversity and Conservation
13, 4 (2004): 813–26.

26.
Forest cover in the province more than halved between 1950 and 1990. The worst logging occurred in Xishuangbanna, where 530,000 hectares were cleared between 1947 and 1980—much of it to cure tobacco (Qu Geping and Li Jinchang,
Population and the Environment in China
[Lynne Rienner, 1994], p. 64).

27.
Yang et al., “Biodiversity and Biodiversity Conservation in Yunnan,” p. 10.

28.
As rubber prices have tripled over the past decade, plantations have boomed in Xishuangbanna. Now covering about 400,000 hectares, they occupy 20 percent of the prefecture’s land. Nowhere is safe. China’s leading conservation center, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, home to 11,700 plant species, is threatened by the spread of rubber trees (Jane Qiu, “China’s Leading Conservation Center Is Facing Down an Onslaught of Rubber Plantations,”
Nature,
January 8, 2009).

29.
Personal correspondence and Robert Moseley, “Historical Landscape Change in Northwestern Yunnan, China: Using Repeat Photography to Assess the Perceptions and Realities of Biodiversity Loss,”
Mountain Research and Development
26, 3 (August 2006): 214–19.

30.
Yang et al., “Biodiversity and Biodiversity Conservation in Yunnan,” p. 4.

31.
Jianchu Xu, a professor at the Kunming Institute of Botany, and Jesse C. Ribot, a senior associate at the Institutions and Governance Program, World Resources Institute in Washington, agree with Moseley that local autonomy is the best way to protect forest resources and that locals know best how to protect their environments. In ancient times, there were even elections for forest guardians, who risked being replaced if they were not “fair, straight, honest and moral” (Xu Jianchu and Jesse Ribot, “Decentralisation and Accountability in Forest Management: A Case from Yunnan, Southwest China.”
European Journal of Development Research
16, 1 [spring 2004]).

32.
Tibetan monks at the Taizi monastery blame themselves for the dramatic retreat of the Mingyong glacier because they feel the sacred mountain’s decline reflects a lack of pious devotion on their part (B. B. Baker and R. K. Moseley, “Advancing Treeline and Retreating Glaciers: Implications for Conservation in Yunnan, PR China,”
Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research
39, 2 [2007]: 200–209).

33.
Yang et al., “Biodiversity and Biodiversity Conservation in Yunnan,” p. 5.

34.
Matsutake exports to Japan have made many farmers rich. The business generates more export income for Yunnan than any other agricultural product. In 2005, the province earned $44 million from Matsutake—almost half of which came from Shangri-La (Christoph Kleinn, Yang Yongping, Horst Weyerhäuser, and Marco Stark,
The Sustainable Harvest of Non-Timber Forest Products in China: Strategies to Balance Economic Benefits and Biodiversity Conservation
[Sino-German Center for Research Promotion, 2006]). Studies have shown that production of Matsutake declined from 530 metric tons in 1995 to 272 in 2000. There has been a small improvement since, thanks to the education of villagers and a local initiative to regulate harvesting (ibid.).