lighting up as he recalled the wonder of that time. “It was a unique experience. I was so alone that I could touch nature. I could talk to the forest and the wetland. I learned to hunt and to fish. You didn’t need any skill. The fish were so abundant that all I had to do was put the rod in the water to catch something.”
When life started to return to something like normal in 1974, Ma went back to Beijing a changed man.6 He was still determined to master the wilderness, but this time with research rather than labor. When the universities reopened, he committed himself to a study of agriculture. It was not until 1988 that he returned to Fuyuan for a reunion with his fellow pioneers. The intervening fourteen years had seen the death of Mao and the start of the opening-and-reform policy that brought foreign capital and modern technology into an increasingly market-oriented nation. The impact was evident everywhere. When Ma returned to his beloved wetlands, he was shocked. The transformation he had helped begin with old tractors and a band of puny students was superaccelerated with the support of the World Bank, Japanese engineers, and state-of-the-art drainage and channeling machinery.
The consequences appalled him: “Everything had totally changed. The islands of pristine forest in the wetland were clear-cut. There were no fish left in the river. All the other animals were gone,” he sighed. “I was very sad. I knew I had started this process. But back then, we were just struggling to survive. We disturbed nature, but only a little. Because there were so few of us, we couldn’t do that much damage. We tried to convert the wetland, but we hadn’t been able to do it. But when I returned the wetland had been turned into dry land for farming. It gave me a weird feeling.”
Ma was forced into a bout of self-questioning. He changed direction. A rising star in academia, he switched his field of postgraduate study from agriculture to the environment. The Sanjiang wetlands became the focus of his research and his political activism. Once again, he was a pioneer, this time as a conservationist.
He quickly moved to the forefront of a new generation of idealists, this time devoted to the environment rather than politics. Ma was influential because he campaigned in a very Chinese way. He knew the one-party system, so did not attempt to confront it, working instead on persuasion and enlightened self-interest. He knew that, post-Mao, the nation was sick of ideology, so instead of appealing to vague ideals he focused on the economic, scientific argument for preservation. He knew the government structure was fragmented and competitive, so he built alliances where he could rather than trying to win over everyone. And he knew that in the New China, money talked, and dollars spoke loudest, so he drummed up financial support from overseas.
On paper, the results were stunningly successful, particularly by the standards of what was then still a nascent environmental movement.7 In 1992, China won international plaudits for signing up to the Ramsar Convention, an international agreement on wetlands conservation.8 A year later a national wetland nature reserve was established in Fuyuan under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Forestry, followed by other state-backed development restrictions.9 China joined hands with Russia and international NGOs to formulate a management plan for Sanjiang that was expected to establish a model for nature reserves throughout the nation.10 In 2000, the Asian Development Bank and the Global Environment Fund, which is affiliated with the World Bank, pledged $20 million for biodiversity conservation in the region.
Even the military jumped on the conservation bandwagon. Environmental protection was declared the patriotic duty of the People’s Liberation Army as part of its commitment to defend the homeland. Reforestation was declared a militarily strategic goal.11 Ma’s achievements were recognized with a promotion to dean of the Environment Department at the People’s University, one of the nation’s most prestigious academic institutions. After years in the wilderness, the conservation movement suddenly had a champion, a budget, a pilot project, international financing, and the backing of the state. For once, money, power, and the law were lined up on the side of nature. But even that was not enough.
Anarchy ruled on Harbin’s roads. The taxi drivers had taken over. I had never witnessed anything like it anywhere else in China. The drivers asked where you wanted to go and, if the answer was not to their liking or you failed to agree on an off-meter bonus, they drove off contemptuously without a word of explanation. Even if you were fortunate enough to secure a cab, the driver would stop constantly along the way in search of additional fares, cramming as many people inside the car as possible. At first I found the practice immensely irritating, not to mention dangerous and almost certainly illegal, but there was a reason. Metered fares were distance-based, with no allowance made for time spent in the ever-worsening traffic jams that plagued the area. Local people sympathized. Many passengers even wound their windows down and touted on the driver’s behalf. Few haggled long over the price. Nobody wants to walk when it’s minus 20°C outside.
I was dropped off at the Environmental Protection Department, scene of a similar balancing act between regulatory ideals and people struggling to make a living. Historically, its officials have never been in such a strong position. International concerns about global warming and domestic fears about pollution have enabled the ministry to push through ambitious laws on environmental impact assessment and set meaningful targets for reductions in energy use and toxic discharge. They have named and shamed many polluters, using the media and NGOs to make up for their lack of clout inside the political establishment.12 As elsewhere, the deputy environment minister Pan Yue proved a genuine force for change.13 With other like-minded people around him, the environmental protection bureaucracy appeared to be in the ascendant. At a national level, environmental protection work was given ministerial status in 2008. With it came a full vote in the State Council.14
But the ministry lacks a strong national network. At a regional level, environment departments continue to answer to local governments. Even more than NGOs, they are obliged to work within the system rather than to expose and oppose its faults.
The EPD’s offices were much like those of any other bureau of government throughout China. I was led along uniformly fluorescent-lit corridors past uniformly brown office doors in a uniformly orthogonal building, to the standard interview room, which was square and spacious with calligraphy and landscape paintings on one wall, large low chairs along the sides, and a well-polished table in the middle set with white-lidded cups for the green tea that arrived soon after. Bureaucratic hospitality was pleasingly not so standard, and could sometimes be rather convivial.
Li Ping, the head of Heilongjiang’s Environment Protection Department, was in good spirits—a very different mood from his most famous public appearance in November 2005 as the unfortunate official who had to admit to one of the worst pollution cover-ups in the country’s history.15 That had been, he claimed, a turning point for government accountability. An explosion at a China National Petroleum Company plant hundreds of miles upstream in Jilin Province released more than 100 times the safe level of benzene into the Songhua, one of the three rivers that flows into the Sanjiang watershed. Five people died in the blast at the factory, but it was not until more than three days later that people living along the river were told that toxins were coursing in their direction. In Harbin, officials initially announced water supplies would have to be cut off for a few days for “pipe maintenance.” The truth emerged just before the 50-kilometer poison slick hit the city, prompting a rush to the airport and railway station by those who could escape and fear and fury among those left behind. The disaster was seen as a watershed for environmentalists. Coinciding with the central government’s shift toward a new model of sustainable “Scientific Development,” the Songhua spill was cited as an example of everything that was wrong with the old way of doing things.16
It had taken similar crises in other countries to strengthen the powers of their environmental agencies. For Japan, it was the deadly mercury poisoning incident at Minamata. In the United States, it was the publication of
For a short period, journalists enjoyed an open season. Television broadcasts and newspapers were suddenly free to criticize lax environmental regulations and the hardship of ordinary people. The media was filled with images of Harbin residents lining up with buckets and kettles in icy winter streets as they waited for water tankers usually used for road cleaning.17
For Li, brought up in a political environment where control and secrecy were the norm, the frenzy of media scrutiny was a shock. “It was a strange experience for me to have to respond to a barrage of questions. I had only seen that on TV before,” he recalled. But it was worthwhile. Li told me the media attention brought immediate budgetary rewards. Heilongjiang had been lobbying the central government for ten years for funds to clean up the Songhua. But other rivers, such as the Huai, the Liao, and the Yellow, were considered more urgent. After the
