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OVERHEARD on the Great Wall of China: ‘You know, what they say about
the Wall being the only man-made structure visible from space isn’t true!
You can see the irrigation system in southwest Idaho quite clearly on satellite
pictures.’ The antiquity of the Great Wall, parts of which are more than
2000 years old, places it in a class of its own. Chinese civilisation has
been making a visible impact upon its environment for at least 6000 years.

China is now industrialising rapidly, which threatens the environment.
In July last year, Benxi, a city covering 43 square kilometres, vanished
from satellite photographs beneath a cloud of smog: a landmark reverse for
China.

Since 1982, China has had an environmental protection policy backed
by an Environmental Protection Agency with national and regional offices.
This policy has been held up as a model for environmentally sensitive development
in other developing countries. In September 1988, a party of ecologists
from Britain visited China at the invitation of the Chinese Research Academy
of Environmental Sciences (CRAES), which supports the work of the EPA, to
discuss environmental protection.

We began our visit in Beijing, a huge, drab city of 10 million inhabitants.
In the suburbs we passed forests of high-rise construction sites intended
to increase each person’s living space from 3.3 square metres to 5.5 square
metres by the turn of the century. In the backstreets of central Beijing,
in the shadow of the wall surrounding the Forbidden City of the emperors,
are crowded residential areas of decrepit single-storey houses. Not far
away, luxury hotels are going up in droves to accommodate China’s expanding
tourist industry. Although there are few cars, these have been increasing
at the rate of 20 per cent a year. This increase, which will be sustained
by the output from new car plants producing Chinese Volkswagens and Peugeots,
alarmed all of us familiar with the air pollution and congestion of our
own cities. In Xian, an industrial city of five million, which is also a
base for tourists visiting the Terracotta Army of China’s first emperor,
the EPA plans to test all vehicles twice a year to find out if they meet
exhaust emission standards. In another city, we saw a decibel meter by the
side of a busy street, with a giant digital display to warn drivers, who
all seem to drive on their horns, that the police are keeping an ear on
them.

When we met the director of the EPA in Xian, he told us apologetically
that: ‘Chinese conditions are equivalent to those of the 1950s in developed
countries, and we are now adopting the measures you took.’

In both Xian and Beijing, airborne dust is a major cause of air pollution.
In Beijing this is particularly serious in winter, when north winds blast
the city and its inhabitants with sand from the Gobi desert. This has grown
worse since July 1987 when a fire in North East China destroyed one million
hectares of forest. Local deforestation also contributes to the problem.
We visited a project on the outskirts of the city in Da Xing county where
severe wind erosion of the very fine, dust-like soil causes problems for
local agriculture. New plantations of willows, poplars, cypresses and pines
now cover a quarter of the county, and agricultural production has risen
dramatically under the protection of shelter-belts of poplars. The forest
is now a popular leisure area for workers on day trips from Beijing and
a new fruit industry has been started, with a harvest of nearly 2000 tonnes
of apples and pears expected this season. Eventually, fruit trees will replace
most of the windbreak forest trees to increase agricultural production still
further.

Xian lies in the fertile loess plateau, at the heart of China, and in
the ‘cradle of Chinese civilisation’. Neolithic sites attest to a history
of agriculture spanning 6000 years in the area. During the Tang dynasty
(618 to 907 AD) Xian had a population of two million and was probably the
biggest city in the world. By the 19th century, the city had dwindled from
the capital of China to the status of a provincial town. Its growth since
1949 is due to government policy to create new industrial centres away from
the older industrial cities. When we visited the city the panoramic view
promised by the guidebook from the top of the Big Goose Pagoda was lost
in smog: a combination of airborne dust from soil erosion and industrial
air pollution from Xian itself. Xian ranks at about the midpoint in the
pollution league for Chinese cities.

Coal is the principal industrial and domestic fuel. In northern China,
surprisingly, airborne loess neutralises acid rain in the atmosphere, but
in South China rainfall with an average pH of less than 4.5 has been recorded
in 13 cities. Acid rain is killing forests in Sichuan and Guizhou provinces
in southwest China. Local officials of the EPA in Xian are trying to control
air pollution by reducing the number of small, coal-burning factory and
domestic heating boilers and by centralising electricity generation in two
large power stations fitted with water scrubbers to remove particulates
from the smoke. One of these power stations is in operation. The Chinese
take it for granted that it should provide district heating from its cooling
water, which extends to an impressive radius of 5 kilometres from the station.
One power station is to the east of the city and the other to the west,
so that winds, which are mainly from the north in winter and from the south
in summer, carry emissions away from the city.

According to the EPA, the dust burden of Xian’s air is 800 milligrams
a cubic metre. The source of this is soil erosion in the loess plateau,
from which the Yellow River also transports 16 billion tonnes of silt each
year. The horticulture on peasant smallholdings around Xian seemed highly
productive, with one farmer telling us she harvested five crops of vegetables
a year, but yields of grain in the region average less than 0.75 tonnes
a hectare. With 23 per cent of the world’s population but only 7 per cent
of the world’s arable land China has achieved an amazing feat in eliminating
famine from the country since 1949. The environmental scientists we met
were acutely aware of the precariousness of the supply of food for such
a huge population.

The other main pressure exerted on the environment by a large population
is on water resources. The south of China has water in abundance, but water
is a scarce resource in the north and pollution is a problem nearly everywhere.
Wang Jusi, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told us that the problem
arose in the early 1980s. Since then ‘factories, mills, workshops have been
growing up like bamboo shoots after a spring rain’. During our visit we
looked at water pollution in some detail, and in the eastern city of Hangzhou
we saw the situation at its best and its worst.

Hangzhou is at the southern end of the Grand Canal, an ancient waterway
almost 1800 kilometres long that terminates in the north at Beijing. The
chief tourist attraction of Hangzhou is the West Lake, a lagoon isolated
from the sea by siltation about 2000 years ago, and developed for its ornamental
value in the eighth century. It is extremely popular with Chinese holidaymakers,
15 million of whom visit the more picturesque islands each year by pleasure
boat. The nearby Qiantang River originally fed the lake, but once it was
cut off from this it depended upon a small catchment for its water. Until
recently West Lake was rich in nutrients: phosphates and nitrates, from
agriculture in its catchment area and from domestic and industrial effluent
from the city, caused dense algal blooms. Severe deficiencies of dissolved
oxygen were commonplace.

An official from the West Lake Management Department told us that they
had built a ring sewer around the lake to intercept and divert waste waters,
dredged the lake to remove its sediment rich in nutrients, planted trees
around it to prevent the erosion of the bank, and introduced lotuses to
remove further nutrients from the water. To prevent oil pollution, only
electrically powered boats and rowing boats are allowed on the lake. The
sewage generated by 15 million visitors to the islands is brought ashore
for disposal. Water hyacinths can also choke subtropical lakes. Daily patrols
of a weed boat remove them and other floating debris.

When we visited the West Lake its waters were clear, with an oxygen
concentration near saturation. Yet this admirable situation might be undermined.
Fish consume zooplankton, which in turn feed upon the planktonic algae that
can cloud the water and destabilise the dissolved oxygen concentration,
so high populations of fish could remove a restraint on the development
of algal blooms. Fish food thrown in by fishermen could exacerbate the problems
as could bottom-feeding fish stirring up sediment. It seems likely that
the lake managers will have to place controls on the fishery to maintain
the present water quality; and certainly if it is to be further improved
to the EPA’s ‘tourist standard’.

Around the borders of West Lake, we noted that nearly all the large
plane trees lining the roads are supported on tripods of thick bamboo scaffolding.
The trees were casualties of a typhoon that had hit the city four weeks
earlier. Unlike the mature trees that were uprooted in the hurricane which
hit Britain in October 1987, these were being carefully tended back to life.
To prevent water loss, workers had wrapped the trunk of every tree with
hemp rope, pruned the branches and built a mud wall around the base to channel
water to the roots.

We saw the other side of water pollution in Hangzhou in a trip along
the Grand Canal. The canal, which carries 10 per cent of the city’s freight
traffic, is a large open sewer receiving about 50 000 tonnes of waste water
a day. There are no fish in the section of the canal that runs through the
city, where it is black, evil-smelling and almost devoid of oxygen. When
the canal overflows after torrential rain, its water contaminates nearby
rivers and ponds, killing fish. While we were in China the EPA announced
that it was to receive nearly Pounds sterling 1 million in aid from the
Dutch government to clean up the southern stretches of the Grand Canal.
These measures will include the relocation of polluting industries away
from the canal and the treatment of domestic and industrial effluents. The
aim is to have fish in the canal by the year 2000.

Cleaning up for the tourists

We saw a success story in the control of river pollution near the city
of Guilin. This too is a tourist spot, visited last year by 7.8 million
tourists, over half of whom were foreigners bringing in valuable hard currency.
The tourists come to see the spectacular karst scenery of the area, whose
towering limestone pinnacles can be seen to greatest effect from boats cruising
down the Li river. The EPA in Guilin regards protecting the ecology of this
river as its main task, and manages to combine heavy traffic with a high
standard of water quality. Pollution prevention, along the banks and on
the boats, combined with control of boat design to minimise damage to the
river channel by wash, helps to achieve this. New hotels and industries
are permitted only if their waste water can be treated. After the scenery,
every foreign tourist wants to see another of the area’s specialities: fishermen
fishing the Li river with trained cormorants.

At the end of our visit we returned to Beijing and met members of the
CRAES and the EPA. We had noticed a scarcity of birds everywhere, and few
habitats available for wildlife in the densely populated regions of China
we travelled through. There are laws protecting birds and other wildlife
and their nature reserves too, but neither appear to protect wildlife effectively.
Even the giant panda, which has the status of a national symbol, is still
declining in numbers and is threatened by loss of habitat and illegal poaching.
In one street market near Xian, we counted the pelts of 4800 wild foxes
and even those of wolves for sale. Wild animals appear to be safe only when
they are protected behind a wall: Pere David’s deer have been reintroduced
from Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire to a walled sanctuary near Beijing.

The Chinese are well aware of the problems they face, yet China’s long
history has shown that no people is better equipped for the great task that
faces them. But an era of political repression will only make that task
harder.

Jonathan Silvertown is a senior lecturer in the Department of Biology
at the Open University. The environmental tour of China was sponsored by
the British Ecological Society, the Royal Society, and the Chinese Research
Academy of Environmental Science.