Halting the increasing desert sands is a key battle China must win if it is to emerge as a long-term global power, writes Fintan O'Toole, in Inner Mongolia
It is a sight you're unlikely to see anywhere except in China. A fine new road stretches as far as the horizon. On either side, there is mile after mile of pure golden sand, sometimes flat as a beach, sometimes gathered into high conical hills whose serene smoothness gives the impression that they have been built carefully by a gigantic child. If you climb one of the hills, and keep going towards the top while its sandy walls collapse under your feet, you look to the south and see long stretches of vivid greenery.
Looking north, you can see the people who are slowly, with infinite labour, turning the desert green. Small clusters of women and men are squatting on the sand, their heads and arms covered against the sun. They will sit there all day hammering small stakes of willow into the sand. A pattern of stakes on a hill beside the road spells out in Chinese characters a slogan that explains their purpose: "Fighting against the Kubuqi Desert. Preventing Sand Storms." The Kubuqi, on the eastern side of Inner Mongolia, is the desert closest to Beijing and one of the 10 largest in the world. Its name means "bowstring" in Mongolian and describes its long narrow curve that stretches for 400km from west to east and, at this point, for 20km from south to north.
It was once a rich grassland but is now so godforsaken that even the official MongolCulture.com website describes it rather charmingly as "an incurable cancer of the earth". It is part of the Ordos plateau, a vast but largely desolate region of Inner Mongolia, significantly larger than Ireland and bounded by the Great Wall in the south and by the serpentine Yellow River on the other three sides.
Driving across the Yellow River basin from the city of Baotou, it is easy to see that this region was for long unloved. In the early years of the People's Republic, Baotou was developed as the site of a vast Soviet-built tank factory, capable of turning out 1,000 tanks a year. But when China's relations with the Soviets turned sour, Mao Zedong, fearing invasion, moved the factory to the south. The area was left as a dumping ground for heavily polluting mineral and chemical plants. Even now, the view from the highway is dominated for 10 miles or so by belching chimneys, so that the pure sand of the desert comes as relief to the eye.
As in the Alxameng region further west in Inner Mongolia, which I visited in May, the Kubuqi has been steadily advancing in recent decades, and it forms one of the key battlegrounds in one of the wars that China must win if it is to emerge as a long-term global power. Already, almost a quarter of the country's land surface is desert or semi-desert, and the north-western deserts are advancing towards Beijing at a rate of 3,500 sq km a year. The United Nations has estimated that 400 million Chinese people live in regions that are threatened by desertification. China's arable land, which totalled 130 million hectares in 1996 now amounts to just 122 million hectares. Much of this loss has been caused by badly planned development, often driven by corruption, but much of it stems from desertification. The cost is phenomenal.
If environmental degradation is factored in, China's regular economic growth rates of 10 per cent a year would have to be reduced by as much as half.
The Chinese government, in its current Five Year Plan, has drawn a line in the encroaching sand by stating that the total area of arable land in 2010 will still be 120 million hectares. Given that some desertification will inevitably continue, this target is very unlikely to be achieved unless, in some places, the advance of the desert is not merely stopped but reversed. The obvious question is whether the cost of doing this is compatible with continued economic growth.
I WENT TO THE Kubuqi to meet some people who believe that the apparent contradiction between economics and the environment is soluble, and that the desert can itself become a sustainable and profitable business.
Elion Resources is a conglomerate that grew out of Inner Mongolia's old heavy industrial complex. Its core business is chemicals and plastics, and it has long been engaged in the exploitation of the region's extensive mineral and salt resources. In 1998, the company built a 63km-long road across the desert to join up two of its areas of operation. (It has since built two more highways.)
Han Jie, the company's chief communications officer told me that the company's president, Wang Wenbiao, who was himself born on the edge of the Kubuqi, was then faced with the problem that the road kept disappearing under the encroaching sands.
At first, the company simply set out to solve this problem by planting trees and fixing sand along a narrow strip on either side of the highway. Seeing what could be done, however, Wang became obsessed with the notion that what worked for the roadside could work for the desert as a whole. Gradually, that belief has evolved into a 1.3 billion yuan (€130 million) plan to control the Kubuqi. What is striking is that although Wang has made large personal donations to the project, the scheme as a whole is not intended as a vast altruistic gesture but as a serious investment that will, it is hoped, yield a decent commercial return.
The scheme depends on two related kinds of development, each of which is designed to be sustainable. One is tourism. Although the region is arid, the desert itself is starkly beautiful and parts of the Kubuqi provide all the thrills of the Sahara without many of the dangers. Because the plateau is high, temperatures are bearable and its good roads make the region easily accessible. The Yellow River, moreover, feeds a string of small lakes, known as Seven Star Lakes, whose unexpected presence in the desert gives them a special grandeur. Elion has established an eco-village of wooden huts and yurts (circular tents) on Dadaotu Lake. Surrounded by large hills of bleached white sand, the lake itself is extraordinarily lush, with dense reed beds teeming with herons, ibis and swans, and the presence of so much life amid the dead dunes lends the place a magical quality.
A few kilometres away is a large compound filled with row after row of poly tunnels in which vegetables are grown with minimal irrigation. The plan is that when the eco-village is fully operational, the human waste from the tourists will be turned into fertiliser for the vegetables, which will in turn help to feed the tourists. A virtuous circle will have been established.
WHILE ECO-TOURISM may generate some economic value from the desert, however, the main thrust of the project is to roll back the sands. The most important weapon in this war is an unexpected one: liquorice. The plant may be known to most people in the West only when it has the word "Allsorts" attached, but in China it has real economic value. For more than 2000 years, liquorice has been a key ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine, which still dominates the health market, and is used especially for heart and lung complaints. It reputedly turns up in as many as 700 concoctions. (It seems to have genuinely anti-oxidant, anti-inflammatory and anti-viral properties.) It is remarkably tolerant of sandy ground and relatively arid conditions. And its long tough roots are perfect for binding and fixing the loose sands of the desert. It is the combination of these qualities that has led Elion to see liquorice as the key to stabilising the Kubuqi.
Two of the company's managers, Zhang Zengliang and Zhao Xing Wang, take me to see the effects of liquorice-growing. "We're using techniques that were pioneered in Israel and the US," says Mr Zhang, "but adapting them to these conditions and to the possibility of an economically sustainable business. You have to invest a lot of time and labour before you get a return, so you need a long-term view. First, the sand is fixed with stakes and nets to keep it from blowing away. Then, when it's stable, you plant a belt of trees, mostly willow, which doesn't need much water, to provide shelter. Then you plant the liquorice. After three years, it becomes an economic resource. The key is that we don't harvest the plant itself. We dig down, expose the root and cut a slice from it. The root is then covered up again and grows back, keeping the earth bound together in the meantime."
He calls a worker to show me the process. As he gently exposes the root, what is remarkable is not the plant but the surrounding earth that is slowly but visibly turning from sand to soil. The three men beam proudly as they point to it as if it was buried treasure. Which, in a way, it is. The company employs thousands of people for a few weeks each spring to plant trees and has 150,000 acres of medicinal plants (mostly liquorice but also some artichoke, wolfberry, ephedrine and other species) under cultivation. Over five years, it hopes to make €1 billion worth of medicines and to take in a profit of €85 million from their sale. The intention is that much of this money will be ploughed back into further reclamation of land.
While the profit motive underpins the sustainability of the enterprise, it also draws on a deep sense of patriotic pride. There is a real sense that the Great Green Wall, a popular image of the newly-planted forests that are intended to form a barrier against desertification, is replacing the old Great Wall as the line of national defence and that repelling the desert has become the new form of the old imperative to repel the Mongol hordes. There could be few more constructive ways of harnessing national pride.
PROJECTS SUCH AS Elion's are massively labour-intensive, but in regions with large underemployed workforces, that is an advantage rather than an obstacle, not least because anti-desertification work can provide an income to herders who have been displaced by the advance of the sands. The physical evidence of success - the fact that people can see large stretches of green where once there was only the endless prospect of parched sand - combats the fatalism that is almost as damaging as the onslaught of the desert itself. A sense of optimism may be needed for a long time yet. Each year since 2000, projects such as Elion's have succeeded in reclaiming an average of 1,200 sq km of desert, but almost three times as much has been lost to the sands in the meantime. The task seems like that of Sisyphus, who had to roll a huge boulder up a hill all day only to watch it roll back down in the evening. Despair would be understandable but hope is a necessity. China needs to believe that it will stop the loss of its land.
Standing on a high hill of sand, watching the workers hammering stake after stake into the sand, trying to pin the Kubuqi to the surface of the earth, Han Jie of Elion turns to me and smiles. "Maybe some day," he says, "there will be so little desert left that the Chinese government will have to pass an order to protect the sand."