To avoid such a future in China and elsewhere, leaders need to prepare for the day when the fossil-fuel tap runs dry. Unless consumer habits change dramatically or technology makes a quantum leap, there might yet come a point when drastic North Korean–style belt-tightening becomes necessary everywhere.
Eco-cities and green buildings could help to allay this risk. But they will not solve China’s problems unless similar measures are taken in the countryside, where the majority of China’s population live.30 The average income of the 740 million rural dwellers is 30 percent of that in the city, but farmers are still far richer than ten years earlier. As they buy more household appliances, bigger television sets, and cars, Chinese country folk are gobbling up more of the world’s food, energy, and raw materials. Although farmers have traditionally been more conscious of recycling, their modern consumption habits are potentially more damaging because, in the countryside, it is harder to make efficiency gains through public transport usage, concentrated power generation, and shared waste treatment. The agricultural workforce was traveling more, migrating to the cities in search of work, returning for harvests and spring festival. As we saw in Huaxi, the Number One Village in China (chapter 6), village economies are also moving into new areas such as mining, food processing, and manufacturing.
The government would like to make rural lifestyles more sustainable. In the snow-clad hills of Liaoning, officials have collaborated with a local entrepreneur and foreign architects to try to create a model sustainable village. But, as I quickly found out, the results from this marriage of technology and business are anything but encouraging.
The taxi driver insisted we pay 20 yuan extra to go to Huangbaiyu, or “Yellow Cyprus Valley,” because the roads were so bad she would have to drive more slowly than usual. Initially, I suspected she was exaggerating to talk up the fare. But after an hour winding along icy, bumpy, hilly roads, I realized she had been generous. She was also free with advice. Assuming we were foreign investors, she warned us not to waste our money. “Many people in this area will cheat you, so be careful. They promise good returns on all sorts of schemes, but the economy is so bad that most people lose out.”
It was a sobering introduction to Huangbaiyu, where a great deal of time, money, and political capital had been invested in what was touted as China’s first sustainable village. With the support of Deng Nan, the daughter of former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, and financial and technical backing from the United States, a local tycoon had constructed forty modern, environmentally friendly homes at a cost of 8 million yuan.31 Unlike the average Liaoning farm cottage, they were, in theory at least, built with renewable materials, thickly insulated, and powered by biogas. They even had their own wastewater treatment facilities. As the first fruit of the China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development, Huangbaiyu was initially touted in 2004 as a shining example of international cooperation on the environment. But nobody was boasting about the project anymore. In fact, local officials and businessmen seemed suspiciously reluctant to talk about it at all. Although I applied for interviews weeks in advance, they all insisted they were too busy to see me.
The reason for the reticence became clear as soon as I arrived. Two years after completion, the eco-village was virtually empty. Locals complained the new homes were overpriced and poorly built. The only two residents told me they had moved in under duress. They had no tap water, their ceilings leaked, and they had to cut down trees for fuel because the biogas supply was not working. The developer was so short of cash that he had been forced to sell his entire holding. Locals said the new owner planned to use the eco-village to house workers at a new bronze and iron mine that would soon be carved into the nearby hills. All in all, the project was a disaster.
“There is nothing good about it,” said Li Qinghong, one of the two disgruntled residents. “I only moved in because my old home burned down and the authorities told me I would not get any compensation unless I resettled here. I much preferred my old home. It had more space and was built better. In this place, they skimped on construction. The materials provided by the U.S. never got used.”
Villagers put much of the blame on the colorful local businessman who wooed Deng’s daughter into backing the project. Dai Xiaolong’s gift of gab and willingness to take risks were remarkable even in a nation that had come to venerate its entrepreneurs. A former soldier and newspaper employee in the local industrial city of Benxi, he headed north to Heilongjing to make his fortune. After several years he came back with a small amount of seed capital and a head full of big ideas. He persuaded Huangbaiyu’s villagers to give him land and money to start a soy- sauce and pickled-cabbage factory. The business soon collapsed, but Dai was undaunted. He convinced the local school to use its tax-free status to set up a distillery. Tianyuan baijiu was a hit, but the success was not enough for Dai, who was in a hurry to get rich. He opened more than a dozen distilleries, then expanded into slaughterhouses, fish farms, and tourist resorts.
“It was great for a while,” recalled Mu Baozhi, a teacher at the school. “Villagers who invested 50,000 yuan in Dai’s enterprise were getting returns of 9,000 yuan per year. But it wasn’t well managed. In the end, it all went bust. Dai ended up owing over a hundred million to his investors.”
Mu kindly invited us into his old-style cottage for a hearty lunch of fish, rice, and mountain vegetables. The only insulation was a sheet of plastic taped over the window and a green quilt that covered the door, but the home was far cozier than the empty eco-residences. The old teacher, a Manchu, had lost money investing in Dai’s firms, but he still held the entrepreneur in high regard as a big thinker who genuinely wanted to embrace environmental sustainability, albeit as part of a wider strategy to build a personal empire.
“The sustainable eco-project was part of Dai’s plan to take control of the whole village,” Mu explained. “He wanted everyone to work for him. To do that, he had to provide housing and jobs for everyone. That’s where the eco-homes came in. But he failed to attract factories, so there was no employment incentive for people to leave their farmland.”
After lunch, we trudged back through the snow to the eco-village. But our talk with the second resident was interrupted. A member of the management team suddenly turned up and insisted we accompany him to the office. Having previously insisted they were unavailable, local officials now wanted to put in their side of the story.
The project coordinator, Xie Baoxing, met us in a room dominated by a large scale model of the eco-village encased in glass. We sat on opposite sides and, at first, I felt we were on opposite wavelengths as he extolled the energy-saving benefits of the project while I recalled the reality of stacks of firewood, empty homes, and unhappy tenants.
“How can it work if the people who live there don’t like it?” I asked.
“They are unhappy because their homes burned down. We gave them an alternative place to live. They don’t like it. But we can fix the problems. If you come back next year, it will be completely different.”
“But it hasn’t gone as planned at all, has it?”
“We can’t say we are a model. This is an experiment. We are moving ahead through trial and error.”
“Do you regret starting this project?”
“No, our country is committed to sustainable development. All business has a degree of risk. The problems here are not so big. We can overcome them.”
I sympathized. Xie was not to blame, and he was right that there were bound to be hiccups in the search for a sustainable future. But I departed Huangbaiyu unconvinced that it would ever succeed. If the community was a model of anything, it was how not to construct an eco-village: Dongtan on a smaller scale.
We drove back to the nearest city, Benxi, to track down Dai, but he was busy reinventing himself once again and was nowhere to be found. Having failed to make a fortune with an eco-village, he was now reportedly moving into mining. Nobody considered this a conflict of ideals. It was simple pragmatic materialism, the spirit of the age. Dai was not alone in dreaming up new schemes to be rich in Benxi. The city was another dot on the map where more than a million people were crowding to get ahead. Failing eco-cities were the least of the region’s problems.
At the bus station, I was surprised by the unusually tight security. Police were checking every passenger’s ID, something I had previously seen only in Xinjiang after a murderous attack on soldiers.
I asked the reason.
“This is China. All sorts of things happen here,” a bus conductor replied with considered vagueness.
“Like what?”
“Terrorism.”
“By whom?” I hadn’t heard of any separatist or religious extremists in this part of China before.
It took five minutes to get an answer. I was told the checks had started the previous year for fear of reprisals from “terrorist” investors who had lost a fortune in a bizarre 33-million-yuan ant-farming pyramid-selling scheme. Many staked their life savings on boxes of ants that they were promised would guarantee them rich returns from the traditional medicine industry. When the scam inevitably collapsed, 36,000 people lost their investment.
