When a Billion Chinese Jump

9. Why Do So Many People Hate Henan? Henan

The country is rather over-peopled in proportion to what its stock can employ, and labour is, therefore, so abundant, that no pains are taken to abridge it. The consequence of this is, probably, the greatest production of food that the soil can possibly afford.

—Thomas Malthus on China, 1798¹

China’s most populous² and, arguably, least popular province lay only an hour by air from the glitz of Shanghai’s consumer culture. Traveling from one to the other could be a jolt in more ways than one. Turbulence is usual on the crowded flight paths over the northern China floodplain, but the flight to Henan was bumpier than usual. The shaking of the fuselage forced the Air China cabin crew, who normally wander up and down regardless of the weather, to strap themselves into their seats. All the passengers were gripping their armrests. For the first time in years I felt anxious about flying. Looking out of the window, we appeared to be descending through dense cloud, but suddenly there was a jolt. For a terrifying second I feared a midair collision. But, no, we were in one piece. What was it? Surely we weren’t down yet. I could see no sign of the ground. But I strained my eyes and, yes, thankfully, there was the runway. A couple of hundred yards away, I could just about make out Zhengzhou Airport terminal. The steel-and-glass building seemed on the verge of disappearing into the filthy haze I had mistaken for a dark nimbus cloud. I relaxed. A degree of grimness was to be expected. After all, this was Henan.

“A vision of the Apocalypse,” “Hell on earth,” “The foulest place in China.” When I mentioned I was to visit Henan, expressions soured, distaste rose, and people I would consider liberal, open-minded, and compassionate spewed forth a stream of derogatory comments. Prejudice had become the norm with regard to this crush of humanity. Well-educated Chinese friends casually dismissed people from Henan as greedy and deceitful. Foreign visitors were barely more forgiving. Those who had never been there knew it as a place of AIDS villages and cancer clusters. Even many migrants from the province said they left because their homes were poor, crowded, and polluted. The antipathy so many Chinese feel toward Henan seems to mirror the prejudice that many foreigners express toward China: that it is dirty, overcrowded, and untrustworthy.

I was there to test a theory that discrimination has its roots in population stress; that excess human pressure on the land hurts the health and well-being of those who live on it.

This idea was at least two hundred years old. In the eighteenth century the notorious doomsayer Thomas Malthus argued that too many people on too little land inevitably resulted in a culling of human numbers. He believed people either regulated themselves or disaster would do the job for them.³ Although he never traveled this far east, the British reverend identified China as the prime example of a population incapable of the self-restraining “preventative checks” that “civilised nations” like Britain were able to apply through religion and education. Instead, he said it was regulated by the “positive checks” of drought, famine, and war. Later Western visitors went so far as to see famine as a necessary evil.⁴ China’s emperors knew the dangers of imbalance between human demand and environmental supply. The Mandarin word for “population” is made up of two characters, ren (human) and kou (mouth). But Mao, a believer in strength in numbers, preferred to see each person as two extra hands. It is only in the last few decades that Chinese environmentalists have come to see population as a major cause of their nation’s problems.⁵ Henan illustrates how the attitude to people power has shifted from admiration to concern.

Historically, this province was credited as the cradle of Han civilization. Tai chi, kung fu, and Chan Buddhism (better known outside China as Zen) are said to have originated here.⁶ It was the birthplace of Lao- tzu and other influential philosophers and was a center of political power in ancient times, boasting three former national capitals: Luoyang, Anyang, and Kaifeng. The province once had dense forests and, according to Mark Elvin, more elephants than Thailand,⁷ but those beasts have long since been driven away along with the clearance of land for farms, cities, and people. By the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127), Kaifeng was thought to be the most populous city in the world with 2 million people. Frequent famines suggested the capacity of the land and the numbers of dwellers it supported were often out of balance, but as recently as the 1950s Henan was celebrated for clear waters, abundant harvests, and a rich culture.

Since then, the land has come under more human pressure than almost anywhere else in China. The registered population has surged from 42 million in 1949 to over 100 million. Henan’s population is bigger than that of any country in Europe and all but twelve of the world’s nations.⁸ Yet they are crammed into an area of 167,000 square kilometers—the size of Massachusetts or two Scotlands. This has left the province with the highest rural population density in the country, an environment in tatters, and one of the lowest average incomes.⁹ Poverty and desperation have made Henan the origin of many of the darkest stories from China: cancer clusters, AIDS villages, slave labor, skewed sex ratios due to selective abortions, birth defects, murder, counterfeiting, and pollution.

As we drove away from the airport, the cause of the dark smog soon became apparent. Smoke curled up from bonfires in field after field. I asked the driver to stop and set off across a field of black stubble to talk to a local farmer, who was burning off stalks after the autumn corn harvest. After sorting the stubble into piles, he ignited the bonfire with a cigarette lighter. It burned quickly, forcing crickets and other insects to flee. The billowing smoke was a negative, inverted image of a snowstorm: a blizzard of rising black flakes. He told me that every farmer burns his field on the same day, and explained why.

This seasonal burn has been illegal for over a decade, not because it fouls the air and adds to China’s carbon emissions, but because it is a hazard to air traffic.¹⁰ But the governance problem already noted in earlier chapters is evident here too. The farmers pay no attention. Burning the stubble is the easiest and cheapest way to clear the land and put potassium into the soil. It is an environmentally expensive shortcut. If the stalks were composted and plowed back into the land, their carbon would return to the earth rather than burn into the sky. But that would be too time-consuming for modern itinerant farmers, most of whom labor in the cities and return home for just a few days to bring in the harvest. Because they all violate the regulations at once, the authorities are powerless: it would be impossible to arrest them en masse.

A short distance farther along the road I asked a policeman why he took no action. “This is rural China. This is how things are done,” he said, shrugging. “There will be a big fog tomorrow.”

Such “backward practices” are supposed to be a thing of the past. The authorities have tried to modernize Henan, but the rush to develop often caused more problems than it solved. With too many people and too few resources, the government often resorted to making money quickly by sacrificing morals, human lives, and the environment.

The last two had long been vulnerable in Henan. When the Yellow and the Huai rivers flood, this province is usually hit worst, often resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths. During the Sino-Japanese War the Nationalist general Chiang Kai-shek considered Henan so expendable that he ordered his forces to blow up Yellow River dikes to delay Japanese troops, even though it resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people downstream and left millions homeless. Japan’s air force bombed Zhengzhou to rubble. Rebuilt, it remains one of China’s least attractive provincial capitals.

Mao Zedong warned that Henan was where rebellions started and dynasties were overthrown, but it was also where he pushed hardest to realize his belief that more people meant more power. Short of economic and military strength in the 1950s, Mao shaped his nationalist goals around the huge population.¹¹ The founder of the republic’s credo was Renduo, Liliang Da (With Many People, Strength Is Great). In one of his more idiosyncratic metaphors, Mao compared mothers to aircraft carriers, each capable of launching up to ten fighter-plane babies.¹² To Nehru in 1954, he dismissed the threat of U.S. nuclear weapons because even the world’s most powerful bomb would never be able to wipe out the massive Chinese population. From engineering to agriculture, the attitude was the same: throw enough people at a problem and it would be fixed. Little heed was paid to biological limits or natural balance. The consequences were murderous.