When a Billion Chinese Jump (56 page)

35.
The price has reached $60,000 per kilogram (Richard Stone, “Last Stand for the Body Snatcher of the Himalayas?”
Science,
November 21, 2008).

36.
These brown worm-shaped organisms account for four out of every ten dollars earned by rural Tibetans and provide a bigger boost for the economy than the combined revenue from manufacturing and mining (Daniel Winkler, “Yartsa Gunbu [
Cordyceps sinensis
] and the Fungal Commodification of the Rural Economy in Tibet AR,”
Economic Botany
62, 3 [2008]: 291–305).

37.
In July 2007, eight people were shot to death and fifty wounded in one such battle. In desperation, people are foraging for the treasured fruit in ever
more extreme locations. In June 2007, dozens of pickers died after being stranded in a blizzard. Every year, the fungus is being driven higher as the fragile lower grasslands are trampled into desert by the growing hordes of harvesters (Stone, “Last Stand”).

38.
A cascade of dams on the Lancang (Mekong), including the world’s tall-est—the 272-meter Xiaowan Dam—were already under construction. Thirteen more were being built or planned on the Nu (Salween) and eight on the Jinsha—the headwater of the Yangtze.
Ch. 3
describes some of the consequences.

39.
The impact could be felt hundreds of miles away. China’s dams were already slashing catches downstream in Cambodia, where people depended on fish for the majority of their protein. For more on hydropower, see
Ch. 3
.

1.
Francis E. Younghusband,
Among the Celestials
(Elibron Classics, 2005 [first published 1898], p. 87).

2.
Mao Zedong’s closing speech at the Seventh National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 1945.

3.
Patrick French,
Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer
(Harper-Collins, 1994), p. 223, quotes a letter from Lieutenant Hadow, commander of the Maxim gun detachment, in which he writes to his father: “I hope I shall never have to shoot down men walking away again.”

4.
Ibid., p. 283.

5.
Younghusband,
Among the Celestials,
pp. 15, 246, 254.

6.
Tenzin Metok Sither, a spokeswoman for the overseas-based Free Tibet Campaign, told me it would add to the already tense political situation. “This is a highly strategic project that seeks to tighten Beijing’s control over Tibet and will serve to further marginalize Tibetans economically and culturally.”

7.
On December 9, 1973, Mao informed King Birendra of Nepal that China was going to build the railway. In March 1974, construction on the XiningGolmud section, which had begun in 1960, was resumed. See “The Qinghai-Tibet Railway: 50 Years in the Making,” July 7, 2006,
www.china.org.cn/english/features/Tibet/174015.htm
.

8.
Paul Theroux,
Riding the Iron Rooster
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1988).

9.
Caroline Williams, “Where’s the Remotest Place on Earth?”
New Scientist,
April 20, 2009. (According to Williams, it is three weeks’ journey from Lhasa.)

10.
www.dalailama.com/messages/world-peace/a-human-approach-to-peace
.

11.
Rudyard Kipling,
From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel
(Cosimo, 2006 [first published 1889]).

12.
In an e-mail to the author, Tibetan researcher Tenzin Losel wrote: “Tibet was never a Shangri-La pre-1959, and nor were other places in the world at that time (or today). We Tibetans would never describe it as such. But at the same time we Tibetans firmly deny the ‘truth’ stated by the Chinese government that old Tibet was the darkest, the most backward and the most barbaric society. Serfs did exist in the history of Tibet, but not the kind of serfs described by the Chinese government who did not enjoy any rights and who were merely treated as animals that can speak. The reality was more a contract-based relationship between serfs and their owners.”

13.
Since 1965, the central government claims it has financially supported Tibet to the tune of about 97 billion yuan ($14 billion). In the five years up to 2007, the incomes of farmers and herdsmen rose 83 percent. But the government insists that, far from being overrun by Han settlers, nine out of every ten residents are Tibetan. The environmental situation is also supposedly improving thanks to restrictions on logging and a ban on the mining of mercury, arsenic, peat, and alluvial gold. Over the coming decades, Beijing promises 22 billion yuan in investment on 160 “blue-sky” environment projects (Ye Xiaowen, “Shangri-La Has Changed and Tibetans Know It,”
China Daily,
December 8, 2008).

14.
According to China, this was voluntary. According to the Tibetan government in exile, it was imposed by military force.

15.
Interview with John MacKinnon, head of the EU-China Biodiversity Programme.

16.
In 2002, the State Council estimated 90 percent of the country’s grassland had some level of degradation (Richard B. Harris,
Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China’s Wild West
[East Gate, 2008], p. 38).
Ch. 16
deals with grasslands in more detail.

17.
Jane Qiu, “China: The Third Pole: Climate Change Is Coming Fast and Furious to the Tibetan Plateau,”
Nature,
July 24, 2008.

18.
According to the Free Tibet Campaign, 900,000 have been resettled out of the overall nomadic population on the plateau of 2.25 million. The proportion of resettlements in the Qinghai portion of the plateau is far higher. (E-mail correspondence with Matt Whitticase, spokesman of Free Tibet Campaign.) Reports in Xinhua suggest a higher figure of 80 percent.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-08/15/content_9343243.htm
.

19.
The quote refers to herders of Bange County, northern Tibet, who left the grassland to set up a cashmere and yak wool-carding factory in Germu City in neighboring Qinghai Province. Soon, cashmere sweaters named after the largest beautiful lake in Tibet, Namtso, went on sale in the inland market (Xinhua, “Northern Tibet Grassland Takes On New Look,” May 19, 2009).

20.
“To plunder Tibet of its mineral wealth, the Chinese government first had to clear large numbers of nomads from their land where mines were to be established” (Matt Whitticase, “The End of the Nomadic Way of Life in Tibet?”
Free Tibet,
May 2009).

21.
This is on the Chinese side alone (interview with Yao Tandong, China Academy of Sciences).

22.
The proximate cause of the changes now being felt on the plateau is a rise in temperature of up to 0.3°C per decade that has been going on for fifty years—approximately three times the global warming rate (Qiu, “China: The Third Pole”).

23.
Luo Yong, deputy director of China’s National Climate Center, estimates that the volume of ice on either side of the Qinghai-Tibet highway has retreated by 12 percent since the 1960s, a trend with worrying implications for the tracks. “By 2050, the safe operation of the Qinghai-Tibet railway will be affected if temperatures keep rising steadily as observed over the past decades,” Luo has warned (Chen Zhiyong, “Chilling Prediction,”
China Daily,
December 20, 2004). This is also backhandedly acknowledged by a Xinhua report stating the railway will not be affected by climate change for forty years (“Qinghai-Tibet Railway Won’t Be Affected by Climate Change Within the Next 40 Years at Least, Says Glaciologist,” October 3, 2009).

24.
Qiu, “China: The Third Pole.”

25.
Based on repeat photography study by Greenpeace of images from 1968 and 2007 (Jonathan Watts, “Everest Ice Forest Melting Due to Global Warming, Says Greenpeace,”
Guardian,
May 30, 2007).

26.
Stephen Chen, “The Tibetan Tundra’s Explosive Secret,”
South China Morning Post,
October 16, 2009.

27.
Harris,
Wildlife Conservation in China,
p. 142.

28.
Though small in numbers, Tibetan rangers are more devoted to wildlife than those in other regions, probably because of their Buddhist beliefs. Interview with Xie Yan of the Wildlife Conservation Society.

29.
Ibid.

30.
Kate Sanders, International Campaign for Tibet, personal correspondence.

31.
The “photographer” was Liu Weiqiang, who was under contract to Xinhua. This was the second such scandal. The same year—2007—the forestry bureau in Shaanxi rewarded a farmer for a photograph of a South China tiger, long feared extinct. Soon after it was published online, the hoax was spotted by attentive netizens.

32.
“Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau to Embrace 6 More Railway Lines by 2020,” Xinhua, December 3, 2008.

33.
Kenneth Pomeranz, “The Great Himalayan Watershed: Agrarian Crisis, Mega-Dams and the Environment,”
New Left Review
58 (July/August 2009).

34.
Discussed in greater detail in
Ch. 3
. See also Pomeranz, “Great Himalayan Watershed.”

35.
Since Qinghai was linked to the network in the 1950s, the population increased at least fourfold (Harris,
Wildlife Conservation in China,
p. 28).

36.
Xie Yu, “Graduates Offered Cash Incentive to ‘Go West,’”
China Daily,
January 8, 2009.

37.
French,
Younghusband,
p. 252.

1.
It came into operation in 2006, two years before the quake, and had the capacity to generate 3.4 million megawatts of hydroelectric power, enough for a small city.

2.
The epicenter was just 10 kilometers away, almost a direct hit in geological terms. An expert from the Nanjing Hydraulic Research Institute told
Caijing
magazine that Zipingpu was designed to withstand earthquakes below level 8 on the Mercalli intensity scale; however, the Sichuan quake (known in China as the Wenchuan earthquake) on May 12, 2008, hit level 11. “It’s really a wonder that the dam survived the jolt,” he is quoted as saying (Li Hujun, “Zipingpu Dam Upstream of Chengdu Secured,”
Caijing,
May 19, 2008).

3.
About 1,800 dams were at risk of collapse. According to China’s ministry of water resources, 69 were in danger of collapse after the earthquake, 310 were at “high risk,” and 1,424 posed a “moderate risk.”

4.
As of 2008, about 67 percent of Sichuan’s energy was generated by hydropower plants (Ma Jun, “Overexploitation of Southwestern Hydropower Unhelpful to China’s Energy Conservation and Pollution Control,” Reform and Opening-up Study Series: Poverty Reduction and Sustainable Development in Western China [Social Sciences Academic Press (China), December 2008]).

5.
Cited in Associated Press, “Sichuan Earthquake Damages Dams,” May 12, 2008.

6.
Peter Goff and Tania Branigan, “Survivors of Quake Urged to Hang On as Troops Arrive,”
Guardian,
May 14, 2008.

7.
The water was released at the speed of 800 cubic meters of water per second (Hujun, “Zipingpu Dam Upstream of Chengdu Secured”).

8.
Shai Oster, “China: New Dam Builder for the World,”
Wall Street Journal,
December 28, 2007.

9.
“Sichuan,” formerly known as Szechuan, means Four Rivers. This is an abbreviation of Four Circuits of the Rivers and Gorges.

10.
Interview with Tang Xiyang, coauthor of
A Green World Tour
.

11.
Steven Sage argues in
Ancient Sichuan and the Unification of China
(SUNY Press, 1992) that Dujiangyan was the basis for grain surpluses that gave the Qin armies a huge advantage over their rivals.

12.
The landmark study on this subject in English was by Karl Wittfogel, who argued in
Oriental Despotism
(Vintage, 1957) that power in Asia is derived from water, creating “hydraulic states.” See also Mark Edward Lewis,
The Flood Myths of Early China
(SUNY Press, 2006), p. 47.

13.
Li Bing was a real man, but he is often compared to the godlike emperor Da Yu, who defeated the floods by dredging rather than damming, while his son Erlang is portrayed in classical literature, such as
Journey to the West,
as a miraculous sage and nephew to the mythical Jade Emperor (Lewis,
The Flood Myths of Early China,
p. 46).

14.
Where, according to an official hagiography, “many female schoolmates found him effortlessly attractive” and he excelled thanks to a “photographic memory” (Andy Zhang,
Hu Jintao: Facing China’s Challenges Ahead
[iUni-verse, 2002], p. 2).