davethegrinch.net

Dave Says:

If you truly want to travel, use your nose. Not as a direction finding instrument but as the sense that informs your desirous brain that you’ve arrived. Arrived at what is unclear until you get there and that all depends on what you’re looking for to begin with. In the case of China, I know we’ve arrived at the more challenging aspects of travelling because everything smells vaguely of pee. When life smells like that you know you’re in the real world and not on vacation. Sometimes it smells very much of pee, or in the case of the small child who took a dump right next me on the floor of the train carriage we were in, it smells distinctly of poop.

And there, right in the opening of my piece, is the aspect of China that I find the most distressing. Not the lack of carriage constipation or railway aware regularity but in the general attitude the Chinese appear to have for the cleanliness and therefore the environmental health of their great nation. A two hour hardseat train ride and a six hour bus journey gazing out of filthy windows through rural China has left me feeling distressed, frustrated and a little angry.

As we rode the train I saw the worst of China’s great leap forward. Industrial waste turning water ways crimson red and lime green and chimneys spewing black smoke into the sky. Within meters of this, rice paddies and cultivated fields. In other words, food and pollution sharing the same water table. Seven of world’s 10 most polluted cities are here and acid rain falls on 30% of the country caused by burning the coal that provides 70% of the county’s energy needs.

The government owns all the land - the entire country - and then leases strips of it back to the people on thirty year contracts. Of course, being literally a peasant and having a contract with the federal government is about as binding as it sounds and many people are finding their land is being taken away as the federal and local governments accept whatever incentives, legal or otherwise, are being offered by the industrial sector to build roads, dams, factories and power plants. These are all things promising the great efficiencies to improve every-one’s lives but in reality, improve little and damage much. At least special interest lobbying in the US makes the pretense of going through the proper legal channels - here it’s every man for himself on all levels of the ladder.

As we travel through rural central China, whatever square meter that is not industrialized is farmed. But I use that word loosely, there is not much earth science going on. The land is divided into plots and appears to be over-farmed to the point of being barren. There’s none of the lush green we saw in the rice paddies of Vietnam, just sick looking crops being worked completely by hand. It is almost as if the agricultural revolution never happened. There’s no crop rotation and no fallow land. Any soil that is not growing crops seems to be growing trash, heaps of coal and scrap metal. Desertification is a huge issue. China’s dust-bowl is the largest in the world and desert now covers one-fifth of the country.

I saw mountains today. They were not mountains like the Pacific Northwest but rather razorbacks of rocks, sharp and dramatic escarpments jutting out from an otherwise featureless but sharecropped landscape. Occasionally the local people had left their mark by building a temple or pagoda looking up to or down from the peaks but most of time the peaks were mirrored by factories and coal plants. Each peak seemed to have a companion chimney and around the power plants, pointless, dirty towns sprung up to house the workers.

But, I’m nose ahead of myself. What do these guidebook facts have to do with the kid, his crap and my train carriage? My theory, based on no empirical data whatsoever, is that it’s hard for the Chinese to clean up their act when all they can see around them is ugliness. I’ve seen people throw their plastic bags into the sea and dump their water bottles out of moving trains. In a way, why should they care? It’s the government’s land after all. The great dream of collectivized communism has come full circle to its inevitable nightmare. The people here are doing just what we all do. Ask yourself this: how many times in your life has the wind caught a scrap of paper from your hand? I bet of those times you were at a scenic spot you probably ran around like a lunatic trying to catch it. But, when you were in a city, somewhere you unconsciously believe not to be a thing of beauty, did you put forth more than a half-hearted attempt to retrieve it? When we perceive something of beauty we can’t help at a personal level to try and preserve it but ugliness begets ugliness and that, I believe, is the fundamental issue here in China.

It’s not that the Chinese are dirty people; they like hygiene. The restaurants provide you plates, bowls and glasses in a shrink-wrapped bundle at the beginning of your meal to demonstrate that their implements are clean and professionally washed. Disposable chopsticks are popular because they are considered more sanitary than washed plastic ones. However, the plastic the plate bundle came wrapped in is casually thrown away and 25 million trees are felled in China each year to provide the population with wooden chopsticks. The point they miss is that waste generated by the things that are there to make life cleaner, safer and easier be they wooden chopsticks or hydro-electric dams, will ultimately make life worse if the by-products are carelessly dealt with. Of course, this is not a uniquely Chinese problem but their government doesn’t seem to care about the power plants so why should the population care about a plastic bag?

The smell of China’s progress is not all that great and as it launches itself into the modern world the odor is getting worse. Don’t believe what you read in the press, China is a developed nation, not a developing one. You can still be a developed nation but have a great deal of poverty, take the USA as an example. They know of and own automobiles, air conditioners, TVs and DVD’s yet somehow get an environmental hall-pass on global warming issues. The day when the world considers them to be ‘developed’ and therefore responsible and accountable they will be big and powerful and with nobody as large to tell them otherwise, they will, just like the USA, refuse to play by the rules. China takes the mass production that we in the west and, it must be said, they themselves count on for cheap plastic things and sacrifices itself to make a buck or two. I’m trying to take photos of the dirt, waste and filth because this is the real China but I don’t want my digital memories of this fascinating place dominated by those images. I find myself photographing how I would like it to be: exemplified and amplified by the nice tourist areas we visit. The government is good at putting a clean face on certain things and so am I but I need to follow my nose and get down to the nitty gritty if I’m to leave this fantastic place with a perspective that I can least fool myself into thinking is balanced and representative. In the meantime, the great leap has happened. Whether it’s forward or not remains to be seen. Think about that the next time that little sticky label says ‘Made in China”.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 12:45 pm and is filed under China, Global Travels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.