The Amazon rain forest and Brazilian savanna were being cleared for soy cultivation.46 Looming over all forecasts was climate change, which was likely to play havoc with agriculture and cut food production by as much as 40 percent by the second half of the century.47
Incremental efficiency gains alone will not prevent the depletion of resources if the number of mouths and the size of appetites continue to grow at current rates. China, and humanity, will soon have to reduce demand to avoid a crisis. “Consume less!” is an extremely difficult message to sell to the public, particularly in Western democracies where electorates are used to being bought off with promises of ever-higher living standards. On the face of it, authoritarian China appears better placed to impose tough political decisions. Might autocratic leadership, mass mobilization, and draconian prohibitions succeed where elected governments seem doomed to failure? I traveled next to the freezing north to consider whether dictatorship could prove to be an environmental asset.
15. An Odd Sort of Dictatorship
Let us hold high the great banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics, rally more closely around the Central Committee, unite as one, forge ahead in a pioneering spirit, and work hard to achieve new victories in building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and write a new chapter of happy life for the people!
The temperature fell steadily as we rolled north to Harbin on the overnight train from Beijing. I had work to catch up on and was the last in the cozy compartment to snuggle down. By the time I closed the laptop and my eyes, I guess we were passing through the dark countryside of Liaoning. It was a restless night. In the early hours I woke up more than once because my feet were cold. They were sticking out from under the small duvet. I pulled them back, curled up as best I could, and went back to sleep. The conductor woke us at 6:30 a.m. With the light on, I could see why my toes had been chilly. The window at the end of my bed was encrusted with icicles. At minus 22 degrees, the temperature outside was so low that condensation had frozen to the frame inside.
Ice was the main attraction of Harbin, the capital of China’s northernmost province of Heilongjiang. Winter was the tourist season. Tens of thousands of southerners flocked to the city for the exotic sight of slush on the streets and snow on the roofs. The frozen Songhua River was a playground of skaters, dogsleds, ice slides, and pony traps. Techno music blared across the whitescape as cable cars trundled overhead. The highlight came at night, when thickly quilted crowds thronged to the Ice Lantern Festival, where they could wander around garishly illuminated castles and palaces carved out of frozen water. These were no ordinary igloos. Some ice structures were so immense they had their own escalators and elevators. With Disney sponsoring for the first time, the organizers were worried global warming would cut the season short again.
The Cold War seemed a distant memory. But I was in Heilongjiang to measure the ideological temperature. I wanted to see to what extent the world’s biggest one-party state could provide a model for other nations to coerce their populations into living greener lives.
A few years ago that would have seemed an absurd, or at least ideologically incorrect, question. Back then, China’s opaque, old-fashioned communist dictatorship seemed to be mirrored in the country’s dirty and polluted industrial structure. But views had changed dramatically. Following President Hu Jintao’s Scientific Outlook on Development, the government claimed to have made environmental sustainability a priority. It was not just a slogan.
The red government appeared to be turning greener by the day. Its Eleventh Five-Year Plan, for the 2006–10 period, was the most environmentally ambitious document in the history of the Communist Party. It promised to reduce pollution by 10 percent, improve energy efficiency by 20 percent, and raise the share of renewables in the energy mix to 15 percent. During that period China announced its first climate-change white paper and Beijing introduced tighter car-emission standards than those of the U.S. Cadres and government officials were told their promotion prospects would depend on meeting environmental targets as well as economic-growth goals. Pilot programs were launched for the introduction of a “green GDP,” which would add long-term ecological factors into economic calculations. Beijing introduced draconian traffic control and factory relocation schemes to clear its filthy air in time for the “Green Olympics.” National lawmakers passed a bill that obliged local authorities to release pollution information to the public. It looked as though the full powers of the one-party state were being mobilized to create a more transparent and cleaner society. The ideological icing on the cake came when Hu Jintao made the creation of an “eco-civilization” a pillar of party policy.
International opinion was slow to keep up. For years, China’s pollution had been derided along with its politics. But suddenly the pendulum of international opinion swung to the other extreme. Prominent foreign commentators began to laud the virtues of authoritarianism. China’s ability to get things done for the environment was compared favorably against wishy-washy Western democracies that had to buy off voters with ever greater promises of consumption. In the United States, three-times Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist Thomas Friedman enviously proclaimed, “If only we could be like China for a day.”2 In a
One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the twenty-first century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power.3
It is perhaps a measure of the environmental crisis facing humanity and the gains made by China that such an influential liberal was willing to consider dictatorship as, at least, a partial solution.
Heilongjiang provided, at least on first sight, further evidence for this claim. This is a key location for the biggest “greening” campaign on the planet, which has in recent years planted more trees than the rest of the world combined. It is where the world’s biggest army has been mobilized to help protect endangered species such as the Amur tiger. Here too, the one-party state has banned logging and tried to put local and individual interests aside by designating huge expanses of land as nature reserves. And it was in Heilongjiang that a new model of nonconfrontational environmental activism achieved its earliest successes.
Ma Zhong was just fifteen years old when he was dispatched to guard and conquer the Great Northern Wilderness, an expanse of wetlands, dense virgin forest, and freezing winter temperatures that plunged below minus 40°C.4 The challenge was daunting. Humanity had shunned these lands for millennia. The swamps, impenetrably marshy in summer and ice hard during the long dark winter, were deemed almost uninhabitable.
But a harsh landscape and unfamiliar traditions were by no means the biggest challenges confronting Ma at this moment in history. The year was 1969. For three years, his home city of Beijing had been racked by the Cultural Revolution, which pitted student Red Guards against the army, the party, their parents, and each other. On the northern border, skirmishes between Chinese and Soviet troops threatened to escalate into all-out war. Mao Zedong’s solution was to disperse the Red Guards and send millions of students out of the cities and into remote frontier areas to strengthen China’s borders and increase food production by converting land to agricultural usage.5
Ma was the youngest of a battalion of about 100 “educated youth” from Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Harbin who were sent to Fuyuan County to convert marshland to farm fields on China’s northeastern border with Siberia. The urban teenager suddenly found himself living in one of the world’s most desolate landscapes.
The Sanjiang wetlands covered an area the size of Ireland, yet they were home to a tiny indigenous population of just 4,000. Most were Hezhe, the smallest of China’s ethnic minorities, a nomadic, shamanistic culture in which the men hunted by sled and the women wore salmon-skin robes threaded together with animal tendons.
“I have never seen such a wild place before or since in the whole world,” Ma said forty years later, his eyes
