Saturday, February 12, 2011

The middle kingdom's dilemma: can China clean up its environmentwithout cleaning up its politics?.


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In January 2007, a geologist named Yong Yang set out from his home in China's western Sichuan Province with four researchers, two sport utility vehicles, one set of clothes, and several trunks of equipment for measuring rainfall and water volume; a camping stove, a rice cooker, canned meat, and more than sixty bottles of Sichuan hot sauce; a digital camera, a deck of cards, and several CDs of Tibetan music; and as many canisters of fuel as his team could strap to the roofs of their SUVs. No roads cross the part of China to which Yong was traveling, so he also brought topographical charts and satellite photos of the region. His final destination, deep in China's wild western frontier, was the unmarked place on the Tibetan plateau from which the Yangtze River springs.

For several weeks the two vehicles followed the Yangtze west, as the river turned from running water to ice. The thermometer became useless when the temperature dipped below the lowest reading on its scale. Occasionally they spotted an antelope, and once wolves devoured their fresh yak meat. As they climbed in elevation, tracing the course the Yangtze had cut through the Dangla Mountains many millennia ago, the air grew thinner and the wind fiercer. When the ground rose too steeply into the surrounding peaks for the SUVs to maneuver along the riverbanks, they drove on the frozen river itself, though this approach was not without its perils. About a month into their trip, on the auspicious first day of the Lunar New Year, Yong heard a great crunching sound as his front and then back tires slid through the ice, trapping his vehicle midstream. Fortunately, the vehicle wasn't too far submerged, and the backseat passengers managed to clamber out and signal to the second SUV. With a rope tied to the rear bumper, they dragged the vehicle from the frozen river, with Yong still in the driver's seat, transmission in reverse.

Yong and his companions made it safely out of the river. But since then he's continued to travel, in many senses, on thin ice. A vital question had propelled his journey up the Yangtze: the Chinese government is embarking on the most colossal water diversion project ever attempted, and Yong had taken it upon himself to discover whether it would work.



Water is an unevenly distributed resource in China. Traditionally, the south has been lush while the north has been a land of dry tundra and frozen desert. In 1952, Mao Zedong conjured a solution to this inequity: "Southern water is plentiful, northern water scarce," he said. "Borrowing some water would be good." Ever since, China's leaders have dreamed of diverting water from one of the country's great rivers to the other--from the southern Yangtze River into the northern Yellow River. (To fathom the scale of this undertaking, imagine watering the American Southwest by diverting the Mississippi River into the Colorado.)

In recent years, this eccentric scheme has become increasingly appealing to Chinese authorities, as water shortages in northern cities have become more and more dire. In 2002, China's highest executive body, the State Council, converted Mao's grandiose notion into a plan known as the South-to-North Water Transfer Project. Construction on two sections of the project have already begun, but the most ambitious stage is scheduled to begin by 2010. This phase will divert water from the Yangtze in southwestern China to the north, across mountains that rise to 15,000 feet above sea level. The entire project will cost at least an estimated $60.4 billion, and has aroused intense opposition because it is expected to displace hundreds of thousands of people and devastate fragile ecosystems.

Between January and March, Yong's team traveled more than 16,000 miles in the Yangtze River basin, threading every bend in the western reaches of the river. The previous summer they had driven roughly the same route, so they could compare water levels in different seasons. On both trips they collected data on rainfall, geology, receding glaciers, and other trends that affect the volume of water in the river. Yong had learned from firsthand experience that for about four months each year the upper Yangtze is a ribbon of ice; only an engineering miracle could transport the frozen water north. After he spent the summer and fall compiling data and circulating it among several dozen peer-researchers for feedback, he found more reasons to be skeptical of the ability of the project to live up to the government's vision. The bounteous stream of Beijing's imagination became, in Yong's careful calculations, a trickle.

The fact that Yong is free to conduct such inquiries at all says much about the recent political evolution of China. Fifteen years ago, the government wouldn't have tolerated public questioning of large-scale infrastructure projects. But in recent years, criticism from independent scientists and environmental organizations has prompted the government to postpone two planned western dam projects. In September, officials even acknowledged (after the fact) that unsound planning for the controversial Three Gorges Dam project had created a potential "environmental catastrophe." This isn't a sign that China's Communist Party is throwing the country's political system open to full democratic participation. But China's leaders know that a rapidly deteriorating environment could stall the country's economic miracle and ignite political unrest, and so they're experimenting with limited openness to help avert these hazards. It remains an open question, however, just how much scrutiny the government will tolerate, and how much impact Yong will be permitted to have. His midwinter expedition was only the first stage of his odyssey into uncharted terrain.

On my first visit to Beijing, last spring, I wheezed all the way from the airport to my hotel. The thick smog hid any hint of direct sunlight, and for a week I didn't see my shadow. When I returned in mid-October, the city appeared to be a changed place. I was surprised to see clear blue skies. Skyscrapers were visible from a distance, not shrouded in haze. There were other changes, too--swept sidewalks, a sudden absence of bootleg DVD hawkers, more policemen on the streets.

A week later, the city looked, sounded, and smelled like her familiar self again. The street vendors were back, along with the curbside cobblers and the men waving Bourne Identity 3 DVDs. The skies were gray, the sun obscured, and cigarette butts and orange peels once again speckled the sidewalks.

The temporary makeover had coincided--not accidentally--with the Seventeenth Communist Party Congress, the meeting of party bigwigs that happens once every five years and attracts numerous domestic and international visitors. During the congress, the central government, eager to punctuate its new talk of environmental protection with some proof of its commitment, had directed its might toward cleaning up a targeted area for a discrete period of time, reportedly putting regional factories and Beijing's public vehicles on a compulsory holiday. The results were eerily impressive. (Expect an encore for the 2008 Olympics.) But the greater significance of this fleeting transformation was that it exposed the limits of the party's power. The central government can clamp down abruptly and indomitably, but it can't do so everywhere, all the time.

As I wrote in these pages last summer ("The Green Leap Forward," July/August 2007), China's political leaders have in recent years embraced the environmental cause, not out of sentiment or idealism but as a matter of survival. China's environment is becoming so degraded that it risks choking off the country's booming economy: the West balks at buying mercury-contaminated grain, while water shortages threaten Chinese paper mills and petrochemical plants. Also at risk is the country's political stability: peasant riots over land seizures and polluted rivers are becoming increasingly common (see "Pollution Revolution," page 42). But while the central government has issued stern directives aimed at reducing air and water pollution, it lacks the means to enforce them. That's because, in order to promote economic growth over the last three decades, Beijing has gradually relinquished certain types of authority to provincial governments. The result has been dramatic gains in the country's gross domestic product, with new factories multiplying across the countryside. However, provincial autonomy has also enabled local officials to ignore cumbersome central directives, including regulations on matters ranging from food safety to environmental standards.

Understanding their diminished ability to enforce green statutes locally, China's leaders have turned cautiously to civil society for assistance. Since 1994, Beijing has empowered nongovernmental grou

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