Residue burning occurs across China’s agricultural heartland, from Sichuan on up to Hebei. It is illegal, but farmers do it all the same—not because it is an ancient practice, but because it is a cheap and easy way to rid the fields of waste while enhancing their fertility. Before the early 1990s farmers used agricultural residue as their parents and grandparents had done before them: as biomass fuel for household heating and cooking. But since the introduction of cleaner and more convenient combustibles like coal and liquefied natural gas, biomass has mostly fallen by the wayside, left in the fields to be set ablaze after the autumn reaping. In the process it generates an estimated two billion tons of CO2, somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of China’s total yearly emissions.
The North China Plain is China’s breadbasket, containing 65 percent of its farmland and producing nearly all its maize and wheat. Mile after mile the earth lies flat, heaves a little, is flat again. On the west it slopes upward toward the Taihang Mountains; on the north it is separated from the boundless expanse of Inner Mongolia’s grasslands by the Yanshan Mountains.
Once the hunting and gathering grounds of Peking Man and the cradle of Chinese civilization, the plain has become one of the most densely populated areas on earth, home to more than 200 million people. The Yellow River, China’s “gift” and its “sorrow,” is responsible for the rich alluvial soil. It meanders through the middle before flowing, in good years, into the Bohai Gulf, irrigating a region haunted by drought; but it also brings, in bad times, devastating floods and famine.
Today, 45 years after China’s Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution got underway, propaganda trucks roam village streets and bump along dusty back roads during the harvest season with loudspeakers and colourful slogans proclaiming “Burning straw is strictly prohibited”. Steep 500-yuan fines are a small deterrent. Most farmers could not afford to pay them. Besides, mulching and tilling machines remain out of reach for China’s peasantry, which makes up about half the country’s population.
So Hebei’s farmers, like those in the neighbouring provinces of Anhui, Jiangsu, Shandong, and Henan, go on burning, heedless of impractical decrees that come down from research centers in prospering cities a world apart, like Beijing and Shanghai, which use satellite remote-sensing data to study the effects of atmospheric carbonaceous aerosols.
There is an element of rebellion in the burning. Anger over urban and industrial encroachments on farmers’ land and rights has been mounting for decades, rising in step with the large sums at stake in China’s heated economic expansion. It came as little surprise that officials in Baoding were found to be colluding with local companies for years to steal land from poor farmers. Forged land transfer agreements in Wangdu, a county under their jurisdiction, supplied quick profits and new space for clothing factories and processing plants, even as Beijing struggles to find ways to maintain the 120 million hectares of arable land needed to safeguard the nation’s food security.
Baoding is the southern gateway to Beijing and its name means “protector of the capital.” But if this means also protector of the Communist Party, the guardian of the proletariat, the city’s officials have failed by exploiting the very peasantry that carried Mao Zedong to power less than 65 years ago. The chief site of deepening inequality and large-scale social experimentation, the great North China Plain could become the Party’s undoing rather than the socialist dreamscape that Mao envisioned.
Many Chinese still remember the famines of the early 1960s that killed tens of millions. Decades of agricultural reform following that dark era of turmoil have contributed to dramatic improvements in efficiency and crop yields, but they have also opened up a dangerous chasm between rural and urban. The privatization of state or collectively owned land and agricultural enterprises has involved more crony capitalism than many can stomach. Corruption, crime, and drug-abuse now plague the countryside. As the proverb goes, “A poor man’s field may produce abundant food, but injustice sweeps it away.”
The past decade has seen a rising tide of rural protest. The erosion of farmers’ incomes and declining public support for healthcare and education has led to well over a hundred thousand “mass incidents” in the countryside. Peasant farmers by the thousands have besieged government buildings. Flash riots, many of them unpublicized, have become commonplace. Some farmers have chosen to make more dramatic, if not desperate, statements by setting themselves on fire. Elder voices revive Mao’s rallying cry, “rebellion is justified,” while a younger generation seems more willing to act if ever one were to gain feet.
Beijing’s accelerated funding for research in intensive agriculture and genetic engineering, and its growing criticism of corrupt local officials, masks a much deeper problem. The legitimacy of the communist regime is in decay, something not felt 50 years ago when China’s leaders shared more humble backgrounds with the people they led and understood conditions in field better than any before them or after.
Ever since Mao, the Communist Party has used the metaphor of fish in water to characterize the relationship between revolutionaries and the people. One cannot live without the other. Today’s farmers on the North China Plain have to contend with this in a more literal sense as they become frustrated by the soaring allocation of water to urban and industrial use despite growing agriculture needs. Cities like Beijing are sucking up all of the region’s groundwater, to the point where Chinese scientists reckon that the city itself has sunk 2.4 meters since the 1970s as a result. Severe water depletion is expected to reduce agricultural yields 14 to 23 percent by 2050.
Although Beijing has paid more attention in recent years to water conservation techniques, its focus remains on supply-side initiatives such as building colossal dams, reservoirs and canals. In 2002 it began the most ambitious ever. The South to North Water Diversion Project aims to divert 44.8 billion cubic metres of water annually, by 2050, from the Yangtze River in southern China to the north. But some fear that the $62 billion undertaking, first proposed by Mao in 1952, will only exacerbate the current agrarian crisis, forcing the displacement of hundreds of thousands of villagers from their homes, destroying pastoral land, and polluting existing water supplies on a scale far greater than the controversial Three Gorges Dam.
Like so many dynasties before it, which staked their survival on large water-control schemes such as the Grand Canal or the irrigation system in Dujiangyan, China’s contemporary leadership believes that its future depends on this project’s success. It may be right. After all, much of China’s long history reads like a catalogue of revolutionary uprisings induced by agrarian inequality, severe droughts, and flooding.
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier's January/February 2012 issue.
a global affairs media network
A Poor Man’s Field: Crisis on the North China Plain
February 1, 2012
Residue burning occurs across China’s agricultural heartland, from Sichuan on up to Hebei. It is illegal, but farmers do it all the same—not because it is an ancient practice, but because it is a cheap and easy way to rid the fields of waste while enhancing their fertility. Before the early 1990s farmers used agricultural residue as their parents and grandparents had done before them: as biomass fuel for household heating and cooking. But since the introduction of cleaner and more convenient combustibles like coal and liquefied natural gas, biomass has mostly fallen by the wayside, left in the fields to be set ablaze after the autumn reaping. In the process it generates an estimated two billion tons of CO2, somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of China’s total yearly emissions.
The North China Plain is China’s breadbasket, containing 65 percent of its farmland and producing nearly all its maize and wheat. Mile after mile the earth lies flat, heaves a little, is flat again. On the west it slopes upward toward the Taihang Mountains; on the north it is separated from the boundless expanse of Inner Mongolia’s grasslands by the Yanshan Mountains.
Once the hunting and gathering grounds of Peking Man and the cradle of Chinese civilization, the plain has become one of the most densely populated areas on earth, home to more than 200 million people. The Yellow River, China’s “gift” and its “sorrow,” is responsible for the rich alluvial soil. It meanders through the middle before flowing, in good years, into the Bohai Gulf, irrigating a region haunted by drought; but it also brings, in bad times, devastating floods and famine.
Today, 45 years after China’s Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution got underway, propaganda trucks roam village streets and bump along dusty back roads during the harvest season with loudspeakers and colourful slogans proclaiming “Burning straw is strictly prohibited”. Steep 500-yuan fines are a small deterrent. Most farmers could not afford to pay them. Besides, mulching and tilling machines remain out of reach for China’s peasantry, which makes up about half the country’s population.
So Hebei’s farmers, like those in the neighbouring provinces of Anhui, Jiangsu, Shandong, and Henan, go on burning, heedless of impractical decrees that come down from research centers in prospering cities a world apart, like Beijing and Shanghai, which use satellite remote-sensing data to study the effects of atmospheric carbonaceous aerosols.
There is an element of rebellion in the burning. Anger over urban and industrial encroachments on farmers’ land and rights has been mounting for decades, rising in step with the large sums at stake in China’s heated economic expansion. It came as little surprise that officials in Baoding were found to be colluding with local companies for years to steal land from poor farmers. Forged land transfer agreements in Wangdu, a county under their jurisdiction, supplied quick profits and new space for clothing factories and processing plants, even as Beijing struggles to find ways to maintain the 120 million hectares of arable land needed to safeguard the nation’s food security.
Baoding is the southern gateway to Beijing and its name means “protector of the capital.” But if this means also protector of the Communist Party, the guardian of the proletariat, the city’s officials have failed by exploiting the very peasantry that carried Mao Zedong to power less than 65 years ago. The chief site of deepening inequality and large-scale social experimentation, the great North China Plain could become the Party’s undoing rather than the socialist dreamscape that Mao envisioned.
Many Chinese still remember the famines of the early 1960s that killed tens of millions. Decades of agricultural reform following that dark era of turmoil have contributed to dramatic improvements in efficiency and crop yields, but they have also opened up a dangerous chasm between rural and urban. The privatization of state or collectively owned land and agricultural enterprises has involved more crony capitalism than many can stomach. Corruption, crime, and drug-abuse now plague the countryside. As the proverb goes, “A poor man’s field may produce abundant food, but injustice sweeps it away.”
The past decade has seen a rising tide of rural protest. The erosion of farmers’ incomes and declining public support for healthcare and education has led to well over a hundred thousand “mass incidents” in the countryside. Peasant farmers by the thousands have besieged government buildings. Flash riots, many of them unpublicized, have become commonplace. Some farmers have chosen to make more dramatic, if not desperate, statements by setting themselves on fire. Elder voices revive Mao’s rallying cry, “rebellion is justified,” while a younger generation seems more willing to act if ever one were to gain feet.
Beijing’s accelerated funding for research in intensive agriculture and genetic engineering, and its growing criticism of corrupt local officials, masks a much deeper problem. The legitimacy of the communist regime is in decay, something not felt 50 years ago when China’s leaders shared more humble backgrounds with the people they led and understood conditions in field better than any before them or after.
Ever since Mao, the Communist Party has used the metaphor of fish in water to characterize the relationship between revolutionaries and the people. One cannot live without the other. Today’s farmers on the North China Plain have to contend with this in a more literal sense as they become frustrated by the soaring allocation of water to urban and industrial use despite growing agriculture needs. Cities like Beijing are sucking up all of the region’s groundwater, to the point where Chinese scientists reckon that the city itself has sunk 2.4 meters since the 1970s as a result. Severe water depletion is expected to reduce agricultural yields 14 to 23 percent by 2050.
Although Beijing has paid more attention in recent years to water conservation techniques, its focus remains on supply-side initiatives such as building colossal dams, reservoirs and canals. In 2002 it began the most ambitious ever. The South to North Water Diversion Project aims to divert 44.8 billion cubic metres of water annually, by 2050, from the Yangtze River in southern China to the north. But some fear that the $62 billion undertaking, first proposed by Mao in 1952, will only exacerbate the current agrarian crisis, forcing the displacement of hundreds of thousands of villagers from their homes, destroying pastoral land, and polluting existing water supplies on a scale far greater than the controversial Three Gorges Dam.
Like so many dynasties before it, which staked their survival on large water-control schemes such as the Grand Canal or the irrigation system in Dujiangyan, China’s contemporary leadership believes that its future depends on this project’s success. It may be right. After all, much of China’s long history reads like a catalogue of revolutionary uprisings induced by agrarian inequality, severe droughts, and flooding.
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier's January/February 2012 issue.