Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

by Alan Weisman

  “You could climb to the escarpment and look east: chimp habitat as far as you could see, green rolling forest. Gradually those forests have disappeared.” Tanzania’s Gombe National Park, where her institute is based, is down to twenty square miles, and fewer than one hundred chimpanzees. Only on the steepest surrounding slopes, where farmers desperate to cultivate and women desperate for firewood can’t reach, are there still trees.

  She turns and glances at the oil executive. “And now,” she says, “we’re killing ourselves to try to save the Albertine Rift from the oil companies.” Again, she smiles, exactly like before, and everyone laughs. She does not mention that apart from global warming, the two biggest nonnuclear environmental disasters in history are ones that oil companies have left in the jungles of Nigeria and Ecuador.

  She ends with a fund-raising appeal for Roots & Shoots, an international environmental education NGO she has founded for young people in 120 countries, lest they lose hope in the future.

  “Let’s help as many young people as we can grow up with the right values. And,” she adds, “let’s see if we can level out human population growth, to have optimization: the right number of people living in the right places.”

  An auction follows for a portrait of a chimpanzee with Jane Goodall, and for signed copies of her memoirs. The oil executive and his striking blond wife outbid everyone for the portrait, and Jane resurrects the smile once more as she poses for a photo with them.

  Lynne Gaffikin wins one of the books. “It’s for you,” she tells Gladys, who goes to the podium, where Goodall inscribes it. The elegant, elder woman who has devoted fifty years to saving the world’s chimpanzees, only to watch four-fifths of them disappear, hands her life’s story to this young veterinarian who is trying her best for the world’s last few hundred gorillas.

  The smile of recognition they exchange is genuine.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Great Wall of People

  i. By the Numbers

  Lin Xia1 had no idea, until her mother happened to mention it at dinner.

  “I was still breast-feeding you,” said her mother. “I hadn’t had my IUD replaced yet, because my chance of conceiving was low.”

  She’d already returned to work, bookkeeping for a plant that serviced trucks. “Between my job and baby daughter,” she said, smiling at Xia, “I was too busy for another child.” Reaching for an apple chunk, Xia’s father, a retired schoolteacher, nodded agreement.

  Not just too busy. That was only three years after China’s one-child policy began. Although they lived in Anhui province, six hundred miles south of Beijing, there were no exceptions yet for rural families, and they knew the rules. After having a baby, if a woman tried for another, she could be sterilized. So Xia’s mother dutifully informed her factory. In the inverse of maternity leave, she was given abortion leave, including a subsidy that paid for the procedure, her convalescence, and for replacement of her stainless-steel IUD ring. “They still give that today.”

  It was the first time Lin Xia knew of the sibling she never had. “Were you scared? Or sad?” she said, gazing softly at her youthful, round-faced mother, who could pass for her older sister. If they had sisters.

  They were in Xia’s Beijing apartment, on the eleventh floor in a complex of ten identical twenty-eight-story square towers. Her mother gathered Xia’s orange cat into her lap. “It was like having a tumor,” she said. “You have to get rid of it. I wasn’t scared, just a little nervous. After you went away to school, I missed not having another. But not enough to break the law.”

  Breaking the law could mean a fine equal to more than a year’s wages. It still does, the amount varying by province and by how close local population planning officials are to meeting monthly quotas: Like speeding tickets elsewhere, penalties for extra children have represented significant revenue in China. In Shanghai or wealthy Jiangsu province, this “social burden tax” might be US$30,000 for a second child, and more for a third. But a peasant may pay only the yuan equivalent of a few hundred dollars.

  “Back then,” said Xia’s mother, “they mainly forced you to give up the pregnancy. If a woman ran away to avoid an abortion, they’d jail her family until she returned.”

  “ ‘We’ll buy you a rope or a bottle of poison,’ ” quoted her father. “That was their slogan for women who said they’d rather kill themselves than abort. Today, peasants ignore authorities and have three or four until they get a boy. In 1980, they would have bulldozed their houses.” He poured himself tea. “Those bad things were done by local officials. The central government’s intentions were good. China had to control births.”

  Their own parents had suffered through history’s worst famine, from 1958 through 1962. It was during Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward, when private farms were collectivized and millions of peasants conscripted as industrial laborers. Grain was requisitioned for growing cities, even as yields plummeted under inept directives from distant Beijing. Nobody dared disobey. Nobody dared to report true figures from disastrous harvests in terror of being purged, which often meant execution. The shortfall was so grave that up to 40 million Chinese people perished—no one is exactly sure. Millions more were malnourished.

  The memory of not enough food to sustain the population was seared into China’s collective consciousness. “It was offensive to smash houses and confiscate people’s appliances, or to jail a woman’s parents until she got an abortion,” said her father. “But we needed a government policy. There were just too many people.”

  China’s contentious one-child policy, which in 2013 newly anointed President Xi Jinping signaled may be relaxed gradually during his incumbency, is already partly a misnomer. Some twenty-two legal exceptions have allowed 35 percent of families at least two; many Chinese refer to the “1½-child policy.” Because Lin Xia’s parents live in a rural region, they could have tried again for a son after six years—the required length of spacing also varies by province. Besides the rural allowance, since 2002 China’s fifty-six ethnic minorities—anyone other than the 92 percent Han majority—have been permitted three, lest they shrink into cultural extinction. Exemptions were also granted for miners (because of high mortality), for the disabled, and for children born abroad.

  In recent years, single children who marry each other may now also have two, although most couples willingly stop at one: the cost of kids gets daunting if two singles also are expected to help support four retired parents and up to eight grandparents. With China building more and bigger cities than the Earth has ever seen, and filling them as soon as the concrete dries, the newly urban occupants no longer need sons for farmhands. Instead, they need factory salaries to raise the one allotted to them. Only the luckiest who, through some entrepreneurial stroke, propel themselves up the upwardly mobile spiral, even think of more children.

  Although bereft of siblings, Lin Xia also benefited from the one-child policy. Before, when sons had preference, just one-fourth of university students were female. Today, it’s nearly half. After studying mechanical engineering and communications, she works as a science writer. Her magazine’s office is in one of the dozens of skyscrapers built in the pre-2008 Olympics frenzy in Chaoyang, a bleak industrial warren that metamorphosed into Beijing’s gleaming Central Business District. It’s exciting to live in this incredible city and bigger-than-anything country.

  But how big can China actually get?

  It is now the world’s biggest consumer of grain, meat, coal, and steel, and the biggest market for—and maker of—automobiles. It’s also the world’s biggest emitter of carbon, with the soot and CO2 to match. Although China contends that 40 percent of its smokestack emissions are from manufacturing goods for the United States, no one objects to the money, and they keep pumping out more.

  There are now at least a hundred fifty Chinese cities with more than a million people; by 2025, there will be two hundred twenty. During the first quarter of this century, half the world’s new buildings will be built in China. With half
the Chinese now living in cities—compared to one-fifth in 1980—and three-fourths expected to be urban by 2030, the construction will only increase. Although China’s fertility rate dipped to replacement within a decade of the one-child policy’s enactment, sheer momentum means that its population will keep growing for another generation. In 2012, China was adding another million people about every seven weeks.

  “I can’t imagine 400 million more Chinese,” Xia says—that being the difference the one-child policy is widely believed to have made. She’s told her parents about her work, about seeing dried-up lakes around Beijing, the treeless dust bowl of Gansu province, the stinking Yellow River. And the dams: Half the world’s forty-five thousand biggest dams are in China. Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze, which displaced 1.3 million people, is the biggest, costliest construction in human history. It will soon be surpassed by the even costlier South-North Water Transfer Project, which will take a half-century to complete and will channel the equivalent of another Yellow River twelve hundred kilometers north from the Yangtze Delta to thirsty regions around Beijing.

  For the South-North Water Transfer, which will tunnel under the Yellow River itself, water must be pumped uphill over more than half its distance. That is akin to tilting Asia to make water flow backward, frightening to Shanghai, whose Yangtze Delta water will be siphoned northward. Shanghai has already pumped so much water that it’s sunk six feet. The South-North project assumes there will be higher rainfall in upper Yangtze basins as global temperatures rise. But so far, climate change instead has brought droughts so deep that coal barges can’t navigate low river levels, causing power shortages and driving China to the brink of needing to import rice and wheat.

  Lin Xia recalls another slogan, from the Chinese National Population and Family Planning Commission: “Mother Earth is too tired to sustain more children.” She once heard a prominent Chinese demographer remark that 700 million would be the right population for China—just over half the current 1.3 billion. Given the dust storms the size of Mongolia that she has seen, and smog blanketing four contiguous provinces, she would agree.

  “Imagine,” she says. “We wouldn’t have to burn all that coal, or build more dams.”

  Seven hundred million was China’s population in 1964. Just a half-century ago.

  ii. Rocket Science

  Around 2030, China’s numbers should peak just below 1.5 billion—even an easing of China’s childbirth rules isn’t expected to change the modern preference for small families. Population will then drop dramatically as members of the transitional generation between high-fertility and low-fertility China pass away. After years of subreplacement fertility, there simply won’t be as many births to replace them. By 2100, there will again be fewer than a billion Chinese. The problem, however, is what will happen between now and then.

  That aging transitional generation is on Jiang Zhenghua’s mind as he sits in the garden of the Red Wall Restaurant in a quiet alley in one of Beijing’s few remaining old hutongs, a few blocks from the Forbidden City. He is waiting to dine with an American scientist interested in his role in developing China’s one-child policy, whose thirtieth anniversary, September 25, 2010, is three days away. He looks forward to meeting her. She has been honored with awards in Europe, Asia, and America for visionary work that calculates the cost-benefits to humans derived from preserving the environment, showing that it’s in people’s best interest not to dismantle the natural infrastructure from which humanity springs. She is also, he understands, a protégée of American population biologist Paul Ehrlich, whose work was noted with interest when China decided to rein in its population.

  In China, she is collaborating with one of his own protégés, demographer Li Shuzhou, an expert in an unforeseen consequence of the one-child policy: millions of girls missing from the census roles. In 2000, Li Shuzhou cofounded Care for Girls, a program that counsels and provides loans to families that wanted sons but got daughters, and monitors the girls’ upbringing. As for Jiang Zhenghua himself, now vice-chairman of the Central Committee of the Chinese Peasants and Workers Democratic Party, the government has called upon him to help solve a related challenge: how to care for the elderly, now that there are far fewer young people. It will be interesting to hear what the American scientist thinks about that.

  “Professor Jiang, a pleasure,” says Gretchen Daily. He beams at the trim, athletic woman with short fair hair and friendly light eyes. She smiles back at the professorial man in pin-striped suit and paisley tie. With his hair still dark and his posture erect, only Jiang’s oversized rimless glasses suggest that he is in his mid-seventies. He introduces her to the woman who manages the restaurant, who dotes on him. He orders for them: duck, organic rice with braised sea cucumber, an Australian shiraz. He sits back, hands folded.

  Jiang Zhenghua was born in one of China’s loveliest cities, Hangzhou—but just barely. It was during the Sino-Japanese War, and Hangzhou had just been invaded. His parents were fleeing when his mother went into labor at the city gate, where she delivered him, so they stayed. His father taught primary school, history, and geography; his mother taught mathematics. When the war ended and the country adopted communism under Mao Zedong, his historian father gave him books explaining how, over hundreds of generations, Chinese came to believe in government as the authority destined to unite people for a better life.

  By the late 1950s, after graduating in electrical engineering from Jiaotong University, Jiang was already hearing discussion of plans to stabilize China’s population somewhere between 700 and 800 million people, so that his country would have a healthier environment in which to develop.

  “What were the concerns?” Gretchen asks. “Food and health care? Forests? Land degradation? What were people thinking then?”

  “Economic development,” he answers. “In the 1950s, Chinese people didn’t know about environment. To the Chinese way of thinking, we are a huge country rich in resources, so we don’t need to worry about that. Until, of course, 1958. The Great Leap Forward, you know. We did many silly things. We cut trees in the mountains until they were bald. We tried to smelt iron in poor ovens.”

  During Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which jerked China from six thousand years of agrarian life into the industrial age, the air filled with oily smoke from hundreds of thousands of backyard brick furnaces that peasants were ordered to build to smelt scrap iron. To meet quotas, families melted down bicycles and their own pots and pans. Because the furnaces were fired mainly with green wood from millions of newly felled trees, the pig iron that resulted was mostly useless.

  “Silly,” Jiang repeats. “But at the time nobody thought it was unreasonable. In the 1950s, the government was highly respected. This was just after the Japanese War. People believed the Communist Party could do anything.”

  But the idea of restricting population growth was a radical departure from communism. Marx and Engels condemned Thomas Robert Malthus for suggesting that pressure of overpopulation on resources would limit production, when it was surely the opposite: population provides labor resources that enhance production. Malthus was considered a bourgeois apologist for the capitalist ruling class, who blamed the world’s problems on the lowly and exploited. At first, that was also Party Chairman Mao Zedong’s belief: population was strength, not a hindrance. But following the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai drafted scientists to help stabilize their reeling nation.

  The idea of population control had first emerged years earlier. A 1953 census had produced the surprising news that there were nearly 600 million Chinese. Distribution of condoms and cervical caps ensued, along with a policy of encouraging women to postpone early childbirth and to wait several years before having a second child. Chairman Mao, torn between anti-Malthusian Marxism and realization that numbers were getting out of hand, frequently switched between the two positions. During the Great Leap Forward, he first proposed state birth planning, then abandoned it and persecuted his demographers.

&nb
sp; Mao’s 1966 Cultural Revolution ultimately set the stage for the one-child policy, but in an unlikely way. “I was actually working in missile control,” says Jiang Zhenghua, grinning. “And atomic reactor control.”

  “Amazing,” says Gretchen.

  Just before Jiang graduated in 1958, much of Jiaotong University, including engineering, had moved from coastal Shanghai thirteen hundred kilometers inland to the ancient Chinese capital of Xi’an, in Sichuan province. Officially, this was to spread higher learning throughout the country, but Jiang recalls frequent sorties over Shanghai by enemy planes from Taiwan. There were strategic reasons for protecting his department, where Jiang was asked to work in the new field of computer science. His assignment was to design automatic controls for guided missiles and nuclear reactors.

  During the Great Leap Forward, China’s nascent computational powers were squandered, he tells Gretchen, on trying to streamline steel production from backyard smelters. But following that debacle, for five years the work became very engrossing.

  “We built rockets. We even made our own semiconductor chips.”

  “My husband works in laser physics,” says Gretchen. “He gets all the chips from China.”

  Jiang beams again. But his pride dissolves in a sigh as he recalls what followed. “The Cultural Revolution: If not for that, China might have developed so much earlier.”

  Instead, in 1966 Mao began purging suspected bourgeois elements. That lasted until the mid-seventies, shortly before his death. No part of society, from agricultural collectives to the highest ranks of the Communist Party itself, was spared, and no sector more punished than China’s universities. Student brigades called Red Guards, whipped into a froth by Mao, denounced college administrators and faculties as “capitalist roaders,” counterrevolutionary intellectuals, and traitors. Professors were marched through the streets and beaten. Journal publication and contact with foreign colleagues ceased, and libraries were trashed. By 1967, most universities had closed, their faculties banished to remote regions for socialist reeducation by the proletariat peasantry, who handed them hoes. Many wouldn’t return for more than a decade.