CHINA: The 'walking' dunes
South China Morning Post
April 28, 2001
By CALUM MacLEOD
Mother nature has got it in for Wang Yongxian. In 1988, the farmer fled his hillside cave when flooding triggered landslides on Dragon Treasure Mountain, 80 kilometres north of Beijing. Forced to abandon their traditional cave homes, Mr Wang and neighbours moved down to the safety of the plain. Or so they hoped. Today, a creeping 10-kilometre sand dune threatens to swallow their rebuilt village and set Mr Wang on the run again.
"There was very little sand when we settled here," says the 40-year-old farmer, who serves as Communist Party secretary to an embattled community of almost 700 people. Now the 30-metre high dune that chokes their lungs and stifles their crops looms just 100 metres away and closes in by at least 10 metres every year. "Look at it now. It's right before our eyes,"; says Mr Wang. "If we had known, we would never have moved here."
Like Mr Wang, the central Government has recently woken up to an ecological disaster that has been decades in the making. Nearly a third of China's territory, more than 50,000 villages and hundreds of cities, are plagued by rampant desertification. The danger is greatest in the north, where deserts eat up vast quantities of land per year. Combined with dwindling water supplies, the crisis has prompted concerns that China's capital must retreat south from Beijing to a safer location.
"Environmental destruction is very severe," admits Luo Bin, desertification expert at the State Forestry Administration, the vanguard body fighting to slow the sands. "So many areas have sacrificed the environment for economic development. Vegetative cover grows worse and worse as people waste water resources, plant inappropriate crops and over-graze the grasslands."
Desertification has hit China far worse than most countries. The 1.2 billion population survives on just a quarter of the worldwide per-capita average of arable land and fresh-water resources. Next month, the State Council, China's cabinet, will release the latest speed check on desert expansion. A significant rise is expected over the current rate of 2,460 square kilometres of land lost to desert every year.
And China's problem is going global. Earlier this month, the Japanese, South Korean and Chinese governments met in Tokyo to launch joint projects tackling the Chinese sandstorms that darken the skies of Seoul and other Asian cities every spring. Just last week, a massive sandstorm originating in northwest China and the Gobi desert rose 11km into the atmosphere, charged over the Pacific and halfway across North America.
The haze was news over Denver, but depressingly familiar to Wang Yongxian. If the winds blow, his family huddles indoors to escape skin-scarring storms that stunt the growth of their sweetcorn and fruit-tree seedlings, and lower future yields.
When a dozen destructive sandstorms hit Beijing last year, during the most severe onslaught for half a century, the central Government finally heeded the urgency of the situation.
Visiting Mr Wang's village last May on an emergency inspection of Hebei province and Inner Mongolia, Premier Zhu Rongji voiced concerns that the Chinese capital might eventually be forced away from Beijing. Party spin doctors quickly prohibited the mainland journalists present from printing Mr Zhu's fears, lest they damage the city's bid for the 2008 Olympic Games. The Premier later made a televised call to arms to fight the sandy foe, without singling out Beijing's peril.
The prospect of a lungful of sandy air would horrify the world's athletes. Government experts, however, are quick to play down the threat.
"I tell the Premier not to worry, there's no need to move the capital" says Professor Shi Peijun, Dean of Science and Technology at Beijing Normal University and top consultant on China's anti-desertification drive. Beijing enjoys the lion's share of funding to plant a massive shelter belt of trees and shrubs dubbed the "Green Great Wall". Yet two decades of tree-planting campaigns, and 35 billion new trees, have failed to halt the desert now smothering at least 27 per cent of the country's land mass.
If the capital's status guarantees efforts to safeguard its 12 million people, the rest of northern China still has many reasons to worry. Professor Shi cites three: "heaven, earth and man". Global warming exacerbates the crisis, sending stronger winds each spring. These blasts scatter the poor-quality, sandy earth of northern China, depleted by the planet's most destructive element - mankind.
"We must combine desertification control with poverty alleviation," Professor Shi said. "If you can control the sand but people remain so poor, then the vegetative cover will still be ruined."
Nowhere is this more evident than northwest China, home to most of China's desert and the source of many of the worst sandstorms. After decades of state-sponsored environmental destruction, when massive earth-moving campaigns reshaped the face of China, the state is trying to remedy past mistakes. Economic freedom in recent years has permitted families to increase their herds despite over-grazing and plant dry areas with inappropriate but high-profit crops, such as traditional Chinese medicine.
As western China lags well behind the more prosperous east, the Government's priority is to boost development in the region. Yet efforts to raise local living standards may deepen the root causes of poverty in some areas. Large infrastructural projects and resource-extracting industries are likely to damage the delicate ecosystems along the upper stretches of China's major river systems.
"No country on earth has put such funding into building ecosystems as China," claims Luo Bin of the State Forestry Bureau. "Protecting the environment is a fundamental part of the 'Develop the West' policy. But we have many people and little land. In poor areas, peasants want to get richer, and it's hard to control them." It will prove just as hard to control the prospectors seeking underground energy sources.
The vast dune shadowing Wang Yongxian's home in Hebei highlights to China's leaders how close to home the problem is creeping. Fully fledged deserts lie just 100km from Beijing and advance at about 2km a year. But experts agree the key battles lie in blighted areas of the northwest, such as Alxa in the western reaches of Inner Mongolia.
This once fertile grassland of Genghis Khan's descendants has degenerated into desert, expanding by 1,000 sq km per year, through population pressure, overgrazing and shrinking rivers. The efforts of communist central planners to settle the wandering nomads in the 1950s and 1960s resulted in ever greater concentrations of people exhausting limited resources. Nowadays, tradition more than material need still encourages herdsmen to keep large herds of goats that strip the local habitat bare.
John Liu of the Television Trust for the Environment has documented the crisis at Alxa in the film A Line in the Sand, to be broadcast on BBC World's Earth Report, and throughout China, later this year. "The local people say, 'It used to rain on cloudy days, but now even if it gets cloudy it doesn't rain'," Liu reports. The run-off from Alxa's Black River has dropped dramatically in recent years, forcing farmers and herdsmen to drain the two ancient underground reservoirs beneath the local-government seat in Bayanhot. One of these "aquifers", which have very slow recharge rates, has lost all its 700 million cubic metres of water.
"The grassland is a very fragile ecosystem which can easily collapse into desert," explains Mr Liu. "This is the frontline. If you keep pulling back, then the frontline will come to you. We must be able to find models to slow the devastation. Perhaps it is good that the Chinese are on the front line. They are survivors and will try anything."
Innovations currently on trial include dispatching grass seeds aboard space rockets to mutate into desert-resistant varieties. Simpler methods involve stabilising the "walking" dunes with grids of compacted straw.
Begun in the 1970s, resettlement projects attempt to move people away from danger areas, where human incursion accelerates the desert's advance. "The resettlement areas are controversial," says Mr Liu, "but better than having the whole ecosystem destroyed by illiterate herdsmen who raise thousands of animals for status not subsistence. Their lives will not improve if you leave them out goat-herding."
While experts warn that tree planting is also no panacea for desertification, and express concerns about forest maintenance and insufficient biodiversity, afforestation remains the concept and cause best calculated to win public support. This year is China's "Forest Year", and the central Government has pledged that tree planting will intensify.
Yet earlier this month, the Deputy Party Secretary of Inner Mongolia, Yang Shijie, complained of insufficient funding for reforesting his impoverished region. Mr Yang also complained of insufficient manpower to plant the saplings promised by Beijing. He appealed to local entrepreneurs to invest in saving their homeland, of which 60 per cent is already swallowed by sand.
Mr Liu believes the responsibility is global. "Where is the investment going to come from to resettle the people and stabilise the dunes?" he asks. "The rest of the world can ignore this problem for now, but not forever. If we have any moral fibre, we'll face it now, reduce the suffering and come up with working models."
The National People's Congress is facing the crisis by debating and drafting China's first law on desert control. Existing laws touch on desertification, but none have dealt head-on with root causes such as logging and land reclamation. If it is implemented locally, the law should lend legislative muscle to China's vague but ambitious targets: to bring desertification "basically under control" within 10 years; to contain the "overall sand invasion" by 2030; and to bring all desert areas "under control" by 2050. The law may also speed up the resettlement programme, but even these new "development areas" may prove only temporary unless China can resolve its water crisis.
Severe droughts over the past decade have quickened the rate of desertification. Among the mainland's 668 cities, at least 400, including Beijing, now suffer from water shortages. In Alxa, the ancient underground reserves are being sucked dry, while in Hebei, Wang Xiaoying and fellow villagers dig their wells ever deeper. John Liu urges China to adopt the "ecologically sensible solution" of conserving existing supplies, not searching for new sources to deplete.
But, true to form, the Communist Party is planning something altogether more grandiose to quench the north's thirst. Next year, construction may finally begin on Chairman Mao Zedong's long-delayed plans to channel water 2,400km northwards from the Yangtze River. The water-diversion project will dwarf even the controversial Three Gorges Dam on the upper Yangtze. Conservation experts fear both the drain on the Yangtze's resources and that prohibitive costs will make the project irrelevant to most Chinese farmers.
"It will be like Evian," worries one Western environmentalist in Beijing, and thus most appropriate to wash the grapevines of Dragon Treasure Mountain. Chinese officials suggest Wang Yongxian should pursue viniculture, as his village lies at the same, grape-friendly latitude as southern France. To irrigate the new crop, Mr Wang need only wait 15 years for the Yangtze to come lapping to his door. Unless his neighbourhood sand dune gets there first.
Yet for now, flooding is his most pressing danger, Mr Wang says, without a drop of the bitter irony drenching his predicament. While Chinese scientists warned last week that sandstorms will grow heavier and more frequent in coming years, Mr Wang must organise villagers to clear sand blocking the dry watercourse that diverts flash floods through the village. Summer rains collapsed Mr Wang's cave 13 years ago. This summer, he fears the rains may wash some of his village away once more.
Calum MacLeod is a Beijing-based journalist.