When a Billion Chinese Jump

9. The Sanjiang wetland reserve in Fuyuan was established in 1993, approved as a provincial reserve the next year and a national-level reserve in 2000. In 1999, Heilongjiang was applauded worldwide for taking the lead in wetland protection when it announced the first ban on the development of swamps and watersheds (Cynthia W. Cann, Michael C. Cann, and Gao Shangquan, “China’s Road to Sustainable Development: An Overview,” in Kristen Day [ed.], China’s Environment and the Challenge of Sustainable Development [M. E. Sharpe, 2005], pp. 3–35).

10. In 1996, the Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund of Japan conducted the first environmental impact assessment of a natural resource exploitation project in China on the Sanjiang Plain with support from the Wild Bird Society of Japan and the International Crane Foundation (Michael Pickles, “Implementing Ecologically Sustainable Development in China: The Example of Heilongjiang Province,” Georgetown International Environmental Law Review, April 1, 2002, p. 2).

11. Troops lent military boats, telescopes, offices, and observation stations to nature reserve staff. In return, the conservationists taught soldiers to identify the flora and fauna of the region. The July 18, 2000, issue of the People’s Liberation Army Daily carried the headline “Every Soldier Is a Soldier for Environment Protection” (Bauer, Forging Environmentalism, p. 65). Bauer also quotes a military official as saying, “The Russian side is full of forests and their observation stations are hidden in the big trees. Our side has few trees and our observation stations and military moves are exposed.”

12. The initial blitzkrieg came in 2005, when the State Environmental Protection Agency, as it was then called, blacklisted thirty projects worth 119.7 billion yuan, then suspended all development approval in four of the worst pollution hotspots: Tangshan in Hebei, Luliang in Shanxi, Liupanshui in Guizhou, and Laiwu in Shandong.

13. See chs. 5, 10, 11, 15, and 16. Pan Yue was advocating the creation of an eco-civilization long before President Hu. Pan was greatly helped by his family’s revolutionary credentials. His father, Pan Tian, is an engineer general in the People’s Liberation Army and his father-in-law is Liu Huaqing, former commander of the navy. Pan has a journalistic background and worked in the Economic Restructuring Office (Andrew Mertha, China’s Water Warriors: Citizen Action and Policy Change [Cornell University, 2008], p. 50). He worked inside the government and the Communist Party to ensure that candidates for promotion were judged at least partly on their environmental records, launched an experiment to assess “green GDP,” pressed for environmental impact assessments for new projects, and initiated a new credit evaluation system with the Bank of China that requires financial institutions to include ecological regulation compliance as a factor when assessing requests for loans. Outside the one-party system, he opened up the space for NGOs, advocated greater public participation in environmental policy-making, and encouraged the media to act as watchdog.

14. Yang Dongping, the president of Friends of Nature, called the upgrade a major turning point in China’s environmental protection (Yang Dongping, “The Turning Point in China’s Environmental Protection Movement,” Bio-diversity Matters, spring 2008).

15. Jonathan Watts, “China Admits Toxic Spill Is Threat to City’s Water,” Guardian, November 24, 2005.

16. The spill and tap cutoff in 2005 were far from unique. In the next eleven months there were 130 other far less widely reported contamination cases on the river, according to Pan Yue (interview in Newsweek).

17. The reporting window lasted four days, then the authorities became nervous and it was back to business as usual. The propaganda department ordered the domestic media to cease independent reporting of the scandal. Instead, they were told to reproduce the officially approved version of events distributed by the state-run Xinhua News Agency.

18. Most of the money has been spent near the Russian border to allay the pollution concerns of China’s neighbor. The results have been mixed. The tributaries are becoming worse as the main river improves, according to the environmental group Green Longjiang. Li’s official position is that the improvements can be observed along the entire waterway. Nonetheless, the river is still foul. Downstream from Harbin, the water quality remains a dismal four on a declining scale of five, which means it is fit only for irrigation and industry. But even this is better than the situation before the 2005 spill, when it was deemed so contaminated as to be of no use anywhere.

19. Several local journalists and officials sympathized with Heilongjiang’s government, saying they had to lie because Jilin, the neighboring province, had lied first and the Heilongjiang officials could not contradict them. In real terms, little changed. The maximum penalty for the polluter was just 1 million yuan, an insignificant amount for China National Petroleum Corporation. Most of the officials involved escaped by offering an apology.

20. Li told me that, during the preceding twelve months, 20,000 law-enforcement officials had inspected 8,000 factories and ordered the closure of 250. Heilongjiang had punished seven local authorities who failed to enforce pollution regulations. Their penalty was a denial of all development plans for six months.

21. According to Green Longjiang.

22. He boasted that his office provides information to more than eighty front-page or prime-time TV news exposes every year, most of them naming and shaming the violators of environmental regulations.

23. Newspapers and television stations played a key role in nurturing green movements in the U.S., Europe, and Japan in the 1970s. But the signs of this happening in China are mixed. Many journalism schools now teach principles that would be more recognizable to their counterparts in Western nations than to their predecessors thirty years ago. Unlike in the past, the first duty of a reporter is to the public rather than the party. Pioneering media such as the Nanfang Daily newspaper group and Caijing magazine, and individual journalists such as Cheng Yizhong, Li Datong, Wang Keqin, Chen Guidi, and Wu Chuntao are pushing back the boundaries of censorship, particularly on environmental issues. And, of course, the Internet has provided a new realm for public discourse and made it far harder for the authorities to cover up scandals.

24. In 2002, there were fewer than fifty registered green NGOs in the country. By 2007, there were almost 3,000 (Jonathan Watts, “The Man Making the World’s Worst Polluter Clean Up Its Act,” Observer, July 8, 2007).

25. Jonathan Watts, “Local Governments Keep Chinese Public in the Dark about Pollution,” Guardian, September 4, 2009.

26. The 2003 Practical Manual for Party Propaganda Work, which includes a foreword by Hu Jintao, notes: “News reporting should hold to the positive-ness principle by handling properly the balance of praise and exposing problems. In any case, the reader should be left with feelings of encouragement, trust, courage and hope” (p. 82, trans. China Digital Times).

27. Ma Jun, China’s Water Crisis (Eastbridge, 2004), p. 114.

28. The Taoist-inspired necromantic belief in the importance of balancing strong natural forces, particularly in one’s home.

29. The three provinces together cover 793,000 square kilometers. Other definitions of Manchuria and Dongbei (northeast) include parts of Inner Mongolia.

30. He Qiutao (Qing dynasty inspector), “Northern Defense Notes” (1858), cited in Ma, China’s Water Crisis, p. 113.

31. By the end of the Second World War, Japan had removed an estimated 100 million or more cubic feet of lumber from the northeast (Qu Geping and Li Jinchang, Population and the Environment in China [Lynne Rienner, 1994]). Many of the darkest deeds in Japan’s militaristic past were perpetrated in this part of the world, which was also a base of chemical and biological weapons experiments on live prisoners.

32. Ma, China’s Water Crisis, p. 114.

33. Interview with Wang Song, former CITES representative for China.

34. Quoted in Ma, China’s Water Crisis, p. 115.

35. The whodunnit mystery surrounding the death of China’s forests is politically charged. An alternative view, which paints the Communist Party in a far more positive light, is put forward by Qu and Li in Population and the Environment in China. They say most deforestation occurred in the centuries before 1949 as a result of population growth, backward agricultural production, feudal leaders’ large-scale construction projects (such as the Great Wall and E’fang Palace), warfare, and the absence of afforestation programs. The latter “path of neglect” was reversed, they say, after the communists took power in 1949, when the government called people to arms with the slogan “Plant trees to cover the country.” This quickened steps to reforest barren mountainsides and valleys. But even these defenders of government policy acknowledge the deficit