While China’s coastal cities and their economies continue to grow at breakneck speed, vast swaths of the Inner Mongolian grasslands are degrading to desert wastelands.
The assault on the ecology of the region started a few decades ago, when Chinese (agri)cultural policies actively swamped Inner Mongolia with Han Chinese farmers and encouraged nomadic Mongol shepherds to settle down.
Moreover, in 1994 Beijing ordered that all cropland, lost to urban and industrial expansion in the coastal provinces, had to be offset elsewhere in the People’s Republic. Seduced by an initial subsidized windfall, the Chinese Communist Party committee for Inner Mongolia signed up eagerly. Inner Mongolia, already heavily overplowed, overgrazed, overpumped and deforested, led the way with a 22 percent cropland expansion.
Excessive cultivation gradually altered the hydrology of the highlands. Freshwater lakes and rivers dried out, groundwater tables dropped almost everywhere, wind erosion intensified. Each spring, increasingly aggressive sand storms blast through Beijing, and cover regions as far as the American Midwest with a blanket of dust and pollutants.
While Chinese officials typically attribute the dust storms to the drought of the last five years, scientists point out that the decline in rainfall might be just another human-induced phenomenon. Air pollutants and lack of forest cover keep rain clouds from traveling north, causing floods in the south as well as accelerating desertification in Inner Mongolia.
China is not the first country to experience dust bowl conditions. However, struggling to feed a fifth of the world’s population with only 7 percent of the world’s arable land, it cannot afford the only effective solution – taking the affected land out of agricultural production. Withdrawal is not an option.
Instead, Beijing has embarked on the second phase of the Shelterbelt Program, a massive tree planting campaign in the northwest. Along with the Three Gorges Dam and the Canal Project, the Green Wall fits in China’s tradition of centrally planned engineering masterpieces, fostered by the belief that man is stronger than nature (and by the creeping fear for the opposite), crafted by millions of ‘volunteering’ hands, and backed by the Party’s propaganda machine. The Green Wall – allegedly the biggest man-made project ever – is expected to “combat desertification”, “bring protection”, “force the deserts to retreat”.
An up close view across Inner Mongolia confirms that the trees are not primarily intended to replace cleared forests, or to help the grasslands to recover. Don’t be fooled by its color – the Green Wall is as native to the grassland ecosystem as a highway, a cow, a fence, a cabbage field, a Mongolian style tourist village, a cellphone mast.
The Green Wall is virtually everywhere in Inner Mongolia. In different shapes and sizes, it outlines the human footprint on the grass – millions of trees lining roads, protecting cropland and screening villages, checkerboard vegetation consolidating eroded hillsides. The Wall sharpens the edge between the struggling farmer and the wilderness, guides the transition from rolling grasslands to a system of dusty wastelands interspersed with arteries of cultivation.
As a result of (or despite) the size of the project, long term effects of the Green Wall remain largely unclear. The affirmative combat of a dust bowl is a fairly new discipline. Most scientists warn that the trees will only accelerate the degradation of the soil, by soaking up massive amounts of groundwater. Some others consider any increase in forest cover a good start. Beijing ensures the nation and the world that “by 2050, all reclaimable desertified land will have been brought under basic control”, while the Chinese might be hearing less optimistic sounds through the cracks in the government’s Great Firewall.
The Great Wall, the one in stone, repeatedly failed to protect the Empire it enclosed. Successive Mongolian and Manchu invaders crossed its defences – Genghis Khan is believed to have simply bribed the sentries – and it was in any case of little use against the sea powers of Japan and Europe. Still, the Wall did have significant functions: subsequently it served as a road in difficult terrain, as a stone quarry and, most recently, as big tourist business.
The assault on the ecology of the region started a few decades ago, when Chinese (agri)cultural policies actively swamped Inner Mongolia with Han Chinese farmers and encouraged nomadic Mongol shepherds to settle down.
Moreover, in 1994 Beijing ordered that all cropland, lost to urban and industrial expansion in the coastal provinces, had to be offset elsewhere in the People’s Republic. Seduced by an initial subsidized windfall, the Chinese Communist Party committee for Inner Mongolia signed up eagerly. Inner Mongolia, already heavily overplowed, overgrazed, overpumped and deforested, led the way with a 22 percent cropland expansion.
Excessive cultivation gradually altered the hydrology of the highlands. Freshwater lakes and rivers dried out, groundwater tables dropped almost everywhere, wind erosion intensified. Each spring, increasingly aggressive sand storms blast through Beijing, and cover regions as far as the American Midwest with a blanket of dust and pollutants.
While Chinese officials typically attribute the dust storms to the drought of the last five years, scientists point out that the decline in rainfall might be just another human-induced phenomenon. Air pollutants and lack of forest cover keep rain clouds from traveling north, causing floods in the south as well as accelerating desertification in Inner Mongolia.
China is not the first country to experience dust bowl conditions. However, struggling to feed a fifth of the world’s population with only 7 percent of the world’s arable land, it cannot afford the only effective solution – taking the affected land out of agricultural production. Withdrawal is not an option.
Instead, Beijing has embarked on the second phase of the Shelterbelt Program, a massive tree planting campaign in the northwest. Along with the Three Gorges Dam and the Canal Project, the Green Wall fits in China’s tradition of centrally planned engineering masterpieces, fostered by the belief that man is stronger than nature (and by the creeping fear for the opposite), crafted by millions of ‘volunteering’ hands, and backed by the Party’s propaganda machine. The Green Wall – allegedly the biggest man-made project ever – is expected to “combat desertification”, “bring protection”, “force the deserts to retreat”.
An up close view across Inner Mongolia confirms that the trees are not primarily intended to replace cleared forests, or to help the grasslands to recover. Don’t be fooled by its color – the Green Wall is as native to the grassland ecosystem as a highway, a cow, a fence, a cabbage field, a Mongolian style tourist village, a cellphone mast.
The Green Wall is virtually everywhere in Inner Mongolia. In different shapes and sizes, it outlines the human footprint on the grass – millions of trees lining roads, protecting cropland and screening villages, checkerboard vegetation consolidating eroded hillsides. The Wall sharpens the edge between the struggling farmer and the wilderness, guides the transition from rolling grasslands to a system of dusty wastelands interspersed with arteries of cultivation.
As a result of (or despite) the size of the project, long term effects of the Green Wall remain largely unclear. The affirmative combat of a dust bowl is a fairly new discipline. Most scientists warn that the trees will only accelerate the degradation of the soil, by soaking up massive amounts of groundwater. Some others consider any increase in forest cover a good start. Beijing ensures the nation and the world that “by 2050, all reclaimable desertified land will have been brought under basic control”, while the Chinese might be hearing less optimistic sounds through the cracks in the government’s Great Firewall.
The Great Wall, the one in stone, repeatedly failed to protect the Empire it enclosed. Successive Mongolian and Manchu invaders crossed its defences – Genghis Khan is believed to have simply bribed the sentries – and it was in any case of little use against the sea powers of Japan and Europe. Still, the Wall did have significant functions: subsequently it served as a road in difficult terrain, as a stone quarry and, most recently, as big tourist business.
Jan Leenknegt
April 2005
