Traveling by bike is a great way – if not the only way – to get around independently in China. It allows me to take the itinerary of my choice, to start and stop wherever I want. Most importantly, biking speed makes me physically experience the gradual changes in the landscape I try to understand.
At the same time I realize I am using the network of the colonizing power, that I am seeing the landscape from the settler’s facilities. The asphalt road (and the restaurants, guest houses and shops along it) which enables me to travel, is the driving force behind the distortion of the grassland ecosystem.
A sample of the linear city along road 207A.
Road 207A to Xilinhot collects both local traffic – tractors, the moving haystacks, donkey carts, motorcycles – as well as heavy trucks on their way to the north. The road is the asphalt artery that supplies workforce, machinery, fuel and fertilizers, and exports the agricultural products eeked out of the fragile highland soils. Over time road 207A has grown into an almost continuous linear city across the grasslands, loaded with farmer settlements, fenced-in agricultural fields, small towns, restaurants, gas stations, tree nurseries, cellphone masts, grazing cattle, light industries, even tacky Mongolian-style tourist facilities.
Roadside activity: ceramics factories,...
... moving haystacks and cattle transport.
Given their economic importance, the roads double as a network of trenches from which the war with the sands is waged. Layers of trees, shrubs and checkerboard vegetation have been planted to protect the linear city from the encroaching sand. The higher I climb on the Mongolian plateau, the poorer the soil, the harsher the struggle, the more visible the sandy scars, the narrower the linear city.
Only in very few sections of my entire trip, the road on which I travel is not lined with fences (occupation) and trees (protection).
For the same reason, almost everyone I meet along the road are Han Chinese. One of them is Reza, an energetic English teacher in Xilinhot. We meet in a small store while I’m buying supplies for the trip ahead. Even though she never went abroad, her English is spotless, with an Oxford accent if any. It feels refreshing to be able to chat after weeks of mute travelling, so I decide to stay another day in the city.
Reza, my guide in Xilinhot.
Reza takes me to her school and tells me about the busy life of a highschool teacher. Even though she is making some money now, she complains she has no time to spend it, in her case on a trip around China.
When I try to explain what brings me to Inner Mongolia, she proposes to take me outside the city to an area where grasslands are protected. “They were destroyed twice but the government restored them each time.” Reza believes firmly her government is trying to save the grasslands. I did come across a couple Grassland Themeparks over the past week, but I have a different view on what her government is protecting.
"Enjoy the beautiful grasslands"...
... and stay in a yurt for a day.
Reza’s geniune optimism and good intentions are endearing. She has been informed about the “Green Olympics” and global warming. I’m not sure if she’s joking when she points out that “Global warming is good for Xilinhot, it is much too cold here!”.
For lunch she takes me to a Mongolian restaurant – “the Mongolians are happy here, we all live in peace, that’s great no?” she says. In the afternoon we overlook the city from the fake Mongolian stupas.
As usual, the geography teacher provides me with sets of characters for the towns ahead, and Reza leaves me with a warning - ”Watch out for the people of Chifeng, they are very cunning!”.
Disneyfication of Mongolian culture by the Chinese authorities.
To my European mind, the way in which this region has transformed over the past five decades is hard to capture. From harmony over exploitation to (discours about) environmental preservation. From Genghis Khan to Disney.
But rather than 'leaping forward', I see thousands of Chinese steadily moving. Transporting huge loads of stones, coal, sheep, silk, cellphones, oil, cabbage, Coke, reinforced concrete on their backs, donkey carts, blue trucks, trains, barges, planes.
Especially in its remote outskirts, China is not jumping from a rural society to a postindutrial market economy. All the in-betweens considered logical by our economics textbooks – agrarian, industrial, informational, dot com – are developing too, at the same time, right next to one another. Destruction and construction sweeps through all these layers, at an incredible pace, at an unprecedented scale.
Jan
October 2006
