had found a stinking pile of hypocrisy. The stench followed me all the way home.
6. Gross Domestic Pollution
Local governments have more revenues, the per capita income is a lot higher and many farmers have turned themselves into workers or even entrepreneurs, but what was once paradise on Earth has been degraded into dumping grounds of industrial waste.
The road to riches is paved with empire-building ambitions in early twenty-first-century China. Dirt tracks widen to eight-lane superhighways. Isolated villages swell into globalized cities. And Gross Domestic Product—that triumph of human quantity over natural quality—expands outward in a widening ripple of concrete, steel, and smoke. The heretics of the age warn that expansion is hitting an environmental limit. The idols find new ways to break industrial ground. In Jiangsu, the wealthiest province in China,2 I traced the environmental tracks of some of those economic pioneers.
My journey began, unexpectedly, in a stretch limousine that had been sent from Huaxi Village to pick me up. It was an incongruous sight among the taxis lined up outside the airport, and I wondered briefly if I was being secretly filmed for a send-up video as the driver opened the door into the spacious leather-upholstered interior.
I could not help grinning. My host, an official with the Huaxi propaganda department, frowned. Not wanting to offend, I tried to explain.
“I’m sorry, I’ve never been in a car like this before and I didn’t expect one here. In my mind, stretch limos are for Hollywood idols and business tycoons. Yet here we are on the way to a model communist village. This is lavish hospitality. Thank you!”
Deputy Secretary Sun Haiyan smiled politely. He then addressed my misconceptions: It should not come as a surprise, he said, to find a limousine in Jiangsu Province. China was no longer poor and we were not going to just any model community; we were on the way to Huaxi, the “Number One Village” in the wealthiest province of the fastest-growing nation of the early twenty-first century.
We drove for forty minutes in embarrassing comfort through the flood-plains. Then suddenly, in the distance, nine massive gold-roofed pagodas rose up out of the rural landscape. Fields gave way to an industrial estate. We passed through streets of shops and then row after row of symmetrical, large but rather tatty pale-blue houses.
We stopped in front of the largest of the pagodas, a hotel. I was checked into the presidential suite, easily the biggest room in which I have ever slept. We were then treated to a lavish lunch of globefish, tapertail anchovies, and more than a dozen other delicacies. In case I had missed the significance of the limousine, this was my chance to be impressed.
Huaxi was proud of its achievements. A pioneer of rural development, it had been at the front line of the semilegal town-and-village enterprise movement in the 1980s that went on to become a driving force of the national economy. By turns surreal, impressive, and alarming, it was an early home to communists with stock options, farmers pushing back the boundaries of industry, and farmers cruising around in luxury sedans.
The eccentric glory of Huaxi encapsulated every quirk and contradiction in modern China, then magnified and distorted them like the image in a fairground mirror. It was a communist Utopia ten years past its sell-by date reinvented as a pioneering capitalist community. It was a Potemkin model village boasting its very own White House and Forbidden City. It was also a model of unsustainability, dependent on relentless expansion to treat its residents to European cars, lakeside mansions, and trips to Hawaii.
Thirty years earlier, most residents were farmers living in small, one-story houses. Few could afford a bicycle. By the time I arrived, they were shareholders with an average living space of more than 450 square meters and at least one family car provided by the village, which had a fleet of 500 vehicles, including twenty Mercedes- Benz sedans and, of course, a stretch limo.
Although everyone on the Huaxi family register was classified as a farmer, many had become wealthy industrialists able to live off their capital and the work done by migrant labor. Residents received a yearly salary of more than 10,000 yuan, a bonus of 70,000 yuan and dividends of more than 150,000 yuan. On paper, their income was more than twenty times the national average.
Unlike in Guangdong, governance was not an issue at this local level. Far from it. Under the benevolent dictatorship of the old village chief Wu Renbao and his sons, the streets were clean and the local workforce was tightly disciplined.
The Wu family’s grip on village life was little short of feudal. They were Big Brother, Big Daddy, and Big Grandpa rolled into one, controlling everything from village-hall politics and corporate strategy to nursery schools and the propaganda theater. Under their strict leadership, holidays were rare even on weekends, entertainment was considered an unwelcome distraction, and no one was allowed to take their paper assets out of the community. Locals were free to leave, but only if they left their assets behind. They accepted Wu’s rule because he kept raising their living standards. In this way, he led their entire town up the economic value chain. As I learned from the old patriarch, it had been a tough, dirty journey.
I joined Wu at a performance in the Ethnic Minority Palace, the theater at the center of the village’s cultural and propaganda activities. On stage, the play was about—what else?—the glories of Huaxi. The dancers lip-synched a song about the benefits of more cars and DVDs in front of a backdrop of the town with giant neon characters that spelled out the slogan “Number One Village in China.”
During the show Wu was constantly interrupting to shout orders to the performers and deliver a running commentary to a group of visitors. I was told he also wrote the script, a sign that, although nominally retired, the old cadre could not completely give up a lifelong urge to choreograph the community.3 Why should he? Wu’s force of personality had defined the character of the village for more than forty years.
Afterward, the great man granted me an audience. Legs splayed and leaning back on a folding chair, he gruffly explained how he created the Number One Village in China. It was hard to make out. Wu’s dialect was so thick that my translator occasionally needed a translator, but the story was well known. Wu’s biography was a classic tale of modern China. From swineherd to industrialist, and from political persecution to entrepreneurial opportunism, Wu led his community along the long, dirty pollution chain from pesticide to aluminum to steel. It was not a forced march. Wu kept his followers going by offering ever-greater incentives.
“In the past,” he said, “when we lacked food, our biggest hope was just to get enough to fill our stomachs. Then, when we had enough to be full, we wanted better-quality food. After that, we wanted everyone to be able to eat all they wanted. Now villagers aim for five things: cash, a car, a son, face, and a house. We can provide all of this, so our mission must be something greater.” Today, Huaxi’s priority is not food but ideology. “We are the Number One Village in China. Our aim is to make all of China rich.”
Expansion underpins what Wu calls the “Huaxi model.” A speck on the map, it initially accumulated capital through the heavily polluting pesticide and aluminum industries. It then became one of the first Chinese villages to list on a stock exchange and the first to franchise its brand, renting the Huaxi name to tobacco grown in Yunnan (another cause of the loss of old-growth forest noted in chapter 1) and a hotel chain in Beijing. More recently it had started to upgrade its steel-milling machinery and begun exporting across the globe.
Wu’s life mission could be boiled down to two words: wealth generation. For him, it was the only ideology that mattered. The seventy-nine-year-old was from a generation that had lived through enough upheavals for several lifetimes. Occupation, revolution, liberation, starvation, persecution, and exploitation—he experienced them all. For him, imperialism, communism, Maoism, and capitalism were not abstract terms in a textbook but ideas that had shaped and reshaped his existence. Perhaps because he knew them so intimately, he had little truck with labels: “It doesn’t matter whether it is a new kind of ism or an old kind of ism, our aim is to make everyone rich.”
