Yangtze Flood Jolts China's Land Policies

As the waters from China's worst flood since 1954 recede in the Yangtze River valley, many people here are hoping that last summer's disaster will become a turning point for China -- a warning to the world's most populous country that it can no longer ravage its environment as it rushes to modernity.

Over the last few months, the State Council, China's cabinet, has issued stern notices, prompted in part by the catastrophe that left 3,656 people dead and doused 64 million acres of land. It has banned most logging in Sichuan province to halt the massive soil erosion that contributed to the deluge. It has prohibited further land reclamation projects that squeezed the Yangtze's flood plain. It has earmarked $2 billion to reforest barren hills in the Yangtze's upper reaches. "Sustainable development" is the new buzzword among Chinese economists and officials.

However, a week-long trip to a flood-stricken region of Hubei province illustrates the difficulty China's central government will face in bringing even the smallest changes to a development model that has taken China's environment to the brink of crisis.

While officials in Beijing, such as President Jiang Zemin and Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, speak in sweeping terms about protecting the environment for tomorrow, local officials are busy worrying about today. While Beijing's leaders promulgate stringent regulations designed to protect the Yangtze's watershed, local officials wonder who is going to pay for them -- and look for ways around the bans.

The future of the environment is one of China's most serious issues. Environmental concerns routinely lead the list of citizens' complaints in public opinion polls. China's environment is also a serious issue for the world as a whole. By early next century, China likely will produce more greenhouse gases than the United States, the world's number one polluter.

"If we had embraced environmental issues years ago, we wouldn't have these problems today," said Liang Congjie, the president of Friends of Nature, one of China's few semi-independent environmental organizations. "It's still an open question whether the government can change."

To understand the complex issues bedeviling China's government, journey to Yangxin, a river-crossed county on the southern banks of the Yangtze in Hubei province, 800 miles from Beijing.

Since the mid-1970s, the county government has emptied 104 lakes and turned the lake bottoms into cotton fields and housing projects. It has moved more than 40,000 people into these areas from poor regions in the foothills of the forbidding Mufu mountains to the south. In all, the county's population has soared from 400,000 to 900,000 since the 1949 revolution.

This pattern has been repeated throughout the Yangtze River basin. Land reclamation has chopped 30 percent off the area of Dongting and Poyang lakes, two of China's largest bodies of water, in less than 30 years. The population of the river valley has more than doubled since 1949, to about 200 million people.

During this year's floods, the Yangtze's flow peaked at less than 2 million cubic feet per second, a rate it had surpassed 23 times since 1949, Chinese statistics say. So by any measure, this year's flow should not have been a problem. But the combination of land reclamation and population growth created an environmental time bomb. It exploded in August.

When the Yangtze's waters roared through Yangxin last summer, the lake beds, which used to soak up excess water, became giant traps. Throughout the region, more than 5.6 million houses were washed away; the disaster caused $30 billion in damage and affected 230 million people, said Niu Maosheng, vice director of China's flood control bureau.

"My pockets are empty," quipped Xu Xinbin, Yangxin's harried county boss as he stood on a crumbling embankment watching a man in a canoe attempt to paddle into the door of his water-logged home. "We are in difficult times."

But for Xu and other county chiefs like him, turning back the clock isn't an option. The reclaimed lakes can't really be restored, he said, asking, "What am I going to do with the people -- send them back to the mountains?"

The money they generate in crops and thus taxes is also a key to the county's economic health. In addition, if water is returned to the lake beds, Xu predicted, another problem will come back to haunt the county -- the snails that host the "blood-sucking insects" that cause the deadly parasitic disease schistosomiasis, and thrive in the moist soil along the banks of southern China's rivers and lakes.

"We look at it this way," Xu said. "The blood-sucking insect can wipe out a whole village, a whole county forever. The floods just come once every 10 years."

Some Chinese officials say that a key reason they fear China will have difficulties learning the lesson of the floods concerns the way the country is governed. China deals with crises by issuing proclamations and blanket bans from Beijing. But the bans, poorly thought out and badly implemented, rarely work. Little effort is made to coordinate policy with county chiefs such as Xu, who then must implement the rules.

A popular expression outside of Beijing goes: "The top has a policy, the bottom has a way around it."

In 1996, the central government shut hundreds of polluting factories that had all but killed the Huai River in Anhui province. A report from the U.S. Embassy in June said 40 percent of them had reopened in less than two years.

Recreating lakes and watersheds is one key to flood prevention. Replanting forests is another. But again, reality is barging in on the government's plans for a ban on clear-cutting China's forests.

Since 1949, widespread tree-felling cut Sichuan's forest cover from 19 percent to 6.5 percent. Statistics for China's once-virgin forests in Manchuria, another area of massive flooding this year, are even more shocking. Not only have the virgin forests disappeared, so have new-growth trees as well.

Sichuan is a key to the Yangtze because clear-cutting in its mountains means erosion and floods downstream.

Lately, China's state-run press has been filled with reports about efforts to stop logging. The media have also announced a much-ballyhooed $2 billion plan for reforestation and timber-production cutback.

But the reforestation plan was originally budgeted at $4 billion, and was cut in half because of financial restraints. Second, the ban on logging relates only to national state-run companies, according to Chinese sources. Half of the logging in Sichuan is done by county- and village-owned enterprises.

Third, the ban was instituted before a program was conceived to reemploy lumberjacks. One million live and work in western Sichuan. After a while, they will resume chopping trees because there is no other way to make money, Chinese experts predict.

"I have mixed feelings about the ban," said Lu Zhi, an environmentalist at World Wide Fund for Nature in Beijing. "I would like to believe that the government has the determination to stop logging but I'm afraid the process will cause the exact opposite result."

The State Council order mentioned only Sichuan, but just to the west stretch the great forests of Tibet, China's last and biggest remaining old-growth woodlands.

Assuming the ban works in Sichuan, China's vast appetite for timber will have to be slaked elsewhere.

"These logging firms could easily move over the border and begin mining Tibet's forests," said one Chinese scientist, as his finger moved west along a map into the upper reaches of the Yangtze's watershed. "If that happens, this will end up being a turning point for the worse, not the better."