If geography is destiny, then China's path was always going to be a hard one. Its people have for thousands of years struggled to hold back its deserts, conquer its mountains and tame its rivers. The Yangtze is the longest and most dangerous of its waterways, but it is the Yellow that is known as the "Mother River." Chinese civilisation emerged along the banks of the Yellow river, and its waters have washed a steady stream of hope and despair down the centuries. Today, a shallow shadow of its former self, it represents a new dilemma for China's future.
The Chinese used to say that the Yellow river was a dragon, with a head of brass, a tail of iron but a waist of tofu. Its middle reaches, between Hancheng and Kaifeng, were often in flood, killing millions of people and threatening the emperor with the ensuing unrest. Almost exactly midway between its source and the coastal delta is the Sanmenxia dam, which features eight huge red characters on its downstream face—huang he an lan guo tai min an ("When the Yellow river is at peace, China is at peace"). This phrase reaches back to the legend of Yu the Great, whose statue stands not far from the dam. He was, they say, the first to control the Yellow river floods; not coincidentally, he is said to have founded China's first dynasty, the Xia, and since that time, the legitimacy of China's rulers has been linked to the ability to control the Yellow river.
The Sanmenxia dam is modern proof that the Yellow river has been tamed, perhaps too much so. Holding back the water has also held back silt, causing big problems upstream. But beyond the dam and its floodgates, the river banks now rarely give way like tofu. Man no longer needs to be protected from the river. The problem now is how to protect the river from man. Mother River is not only shockingly polluted but slowly failing—in three of the last ten years of the 20th century, the river failed to reach the sea, drying up in the province of Shandong, several hundred kilometres short of its natural end at China's east coast. My own recent journey along the length of the river—from source to sea—is therefore a journey into China's future, as well as its past.
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Wolves, foxes and deer dart across the landscape, nervously eyeing the rare human visitors. An eagle circles overhead. The water flowing from the lakes—bright and clear—bears no relation to the muddy flow downstream that gives the river its name. But look closer. Everywhere on the flat grasslands between the lakes and the mountains are dark hollows that scar the landscape. These used to be small shallow lakes—4,000 of them. But barely a thousand of them now feed water to the river. The rest are dry. The river has few tributaries on which to draw further downstream, and northern China is not known for its rain, so fully 40 per cent of its flow is supposed to come from here.
A young Tibetan herder wearing a traditional black and orange jacket with long sleeves guides a herd of straggly yaks across the plateau. In years gone by, this herder and others like him in this largely Tibetan area would have been walking year-round through lush, green grasslands as they had for centuries. Now though, scientists say there hasn't been enough rain and the soil is increasingly dry and barren. Rising temperatures associated with climate change are not only melting the glaciers but destroying the permafrost, which means water is being absorbed into the soil before it can reach the river. The scientists also say that Tibetan nomads are allowing their animals to overgraze, causing severe soil erosion that further diminishes the flow of water to the river. The Chinese government has focused on this last reason, and has started to force Tibetans to give up nomadic herding.
On the outskirts of Madoi is a row of white cinder block houses with red roof tiles and pink window trim; there is nothing Tibetan about their utilitarian exteriors. Inside one of them, cigarette smoke mixes with incense as it curls into the corners of the large main room. The owner of the house, Danma, is one of China's growing army of environmental refugees. He was born in a Tibetan tent and lived in it for 72 years until last summer. His face, like the rings of a venerable old tree trunk, shows the creases of each one of those years. Now frail and almost deaf, he has been relocated to one of these houses, where he lives surrounded by his family. The government gave him the house, and an annual allowance, to quit herding. He is sad, but understands why it is necessary.
"It's very simple," says Danma, his nephew interpreting from his native Tibetan into Mandarin Chinese. "The grasslands have changed. There is no grass, no water. So all we can do is sell our animals, which makes our hearts very sad. It's all because the natural conditions here have changed."
Danma's son and nephew show me around their house, filled with colorful Tibetan fabrics and furniture, a small Buddhist shrine in the bedroom sharing space with a small photograph of the exiled Dalai Lama. The nephew, Dorje Esai, is a study in contradictions. He wears the orange robes of a Buddhist monk, but speaks fluent Mandarin, and pulls a shiny mobile phone from inside the folds of his simple garment whenever it rings, which is often. Dorje says, "Of course, the traditional ways are being eroded, just like the land itself."
On the street outside, pop music blasts from the speakers on a motorbike ridden by a Tibetan youth who, like all his buddies, has traded in his steed for mechanical horsepower. Madoi and the other small towns on the plateau, with their one main street under a wide open sky, resemble the old American west. The erosion of traditional culture brought on by the settlement of the nomadic Tibetans is also reminiscent of the fate of native Americans in the 19th century., though here not as violent China's government says it is all in a good cause—saving the Yellow river—and locals have no argument about that; but saving the river has meant destroying a whole ancient way of life.
Heading northeast from Madoi, we follow a clean, clear Yellow river as it winds its way towards the Amnye Machen mountains. We are still very much in Tibetan territory, but the further east we go, the more we feel the seep of China's influence. My driver Zhou takes me to his house beside the first dam built on the river at Longyangxia. It is a new build, a picture of the Potala Palace in Lhasa on one wall and of Mao on the other. His 80-year-old mother sits beaming a toothless smile. He hands cigarettes—still the currency of masculinity in rural China—to his brothers as they discuss their latest business deals. Although ethnically Tibetan, they speak in Mandarin and address each other by Chinese, not Tibetan, names. "Tibetan is not so convenient," Zhou explains. "None of the Chinese people can pronounce Tibetan names."
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The river, though, is a focal point for one of Lanzhou's few tourist activities: hopping aboard a raft, made from a few slats of wood strapped across 15 inflated pigskins, and pushing out into the river. It is a surprisingly stable craft, and the boatman who takes me out on the river hops about at the back maintaining balance as the force of the river sweeps us downstream. He sings a traditional song of the Yellow river boatmen:
All the big ships run aground on the Yellow river
Because of the mud and the silt
The only way to travel
Is on a sheepskin raft
The song sums up something strange about the Yellow river—that it is almost entirely unnavigable. To the south, one can jump on a boat at any stretch along the Yangtze river and go somewhere, but heavy silting from the loess means the Yellow river is too shallow for almost any type of craft. From here until the delta, more than 2,000 miles to the east, the Mother River is useless for transportation.
Pollution, however, is the immediate concern in Lanzhou, and the city sports several large round buildings—new water treatment plants, which perch like blue bubbles beside the river. Residents say the water is cleaner now than it was seven or eight years ago, thanks in some part at least to the work of a new type of Chinese citizen: the environmental activist.
Zhao Zhong is 25 years old, a tall man whose gentle manner belies a steely commitment to environmental protection. Zhao came to college in Lanzhou, and became concerned about the pollution. He decided he wasn't going to let the Yellow river die, and so set up a group to try to deal with the most pressing issues. Zhao says groups like his are filling a void left by the retreat of the Communist party from people's lives.
"The government has given us the space to work on this kind of project," says Zhao as we head by taxi towards the town of Baiyin, two hours north of Lanzhou. "It allows us to work on environmental issues at the community level. We can't do anything about policy… so we do what we can."
As we approach the town, a road sign urges us: "Create a Harmonious Baiyin, Increase the Speed of Development." With more energy being devoted to cleaning up big cities like Lanzhou, the situation has improved somewhat, but in second and third-tier cities, such as Baiyin, which are largely hidden from the national and international spotlight, pollution is a timebomb.
Zhao takes me through the back streets, where factories cluster and multiply like cancer cells. Heavy metals of all sorts are being purified and refined, the waste being spat back into the local water supply. From smelters and factories comes a dark, fetid outflow which runs directly into the Yellow river. Zhao works with NGOs in Beijing using GPS to record the co-ordinates of each polluting factory, which he then posts on the internet. Several factories have been forced to close as a result of this "name and shame" approach.
After our tour of Baiyin, Zhao drives with us south to a school where he occasionally teaches on environmental issues. He hands out some leaflets to a class of ten year olds. Zhao's commitment is admirable, but he is swimming against a dark and dirty tide. He can't agitate too much, because he doesn't want to annoy the local officials who otherwise let him get on with his work unhindered. So he has to work within the framework of local government, which on paper is committed to cleaning up pollution. In practice, local governments are reluctant to close down polluting factories because of the jobs and prosperity they bring.
The government's legitimacy is almost entirely economic, so it cannot stop industrial growth. It needs to create jobs, which bring social stability. So here is one of the biggest contradictions of modern China, reflected in the murky waters of the Yellow river: the market economy could well be the Communist party's salvation, but it could also be its downfall.
***
Such concerns are nowhere in evidence in the bar of my fancy hotel in the city of Yinchuan, where a Filipino band is playing a passable version of "Hotel California." The arrival of Filipino bands in the lobby bars of hotels in western China is a symbol of how deep into the interior, and far from the coastal regions, China's development has reached. I request "Cry Me a River" and the musicians oblige, after a fashion.
I explore Yinchuan, a city of more than 1m people on the east bank of the Yellow river. It is richer and more pleasant than I had expected. In some ways, it feels like a copy of so many medium-sized cities around China: plenty of new cars, neat rows of new apartment blocks, construction everywhere. In other ways, it is very different. The area has a large Muslim population, which makes it feel more like central Asia.
At the tiny village of Tie Zhu Quan, about 60 miles from the river, Zhang Guangjing flips a switch and pumps his harvest of rainwater from a nearby pond on to his fields. His is one of the few ponds in the village that still holds water. Tie Zhu Quan lies in the shadow of the Great Wall, which intersects the Yellow river just to the north. Here all the water problems of northern China come into sharp focus.
I sit down with Zhang, a wiry 60-year-old farmer, and his neighbours in a courtyard. The villagers have complaints—the bumpy unpaved road, the cost of petrol and fertiliser—but on one problem they all agree. "Water," says Shao Zhong, who has spent all his 67 years here. "We have always lacked water. And we lack money to help us do anything about it."
Shao says an average household in the village uses about 3,000 gallons of water a year—less than one tenth the consumption of a single American. For drinking water, they rely on rainwater gathered in cisterns and deep wells. For crops, there is only the rain. "We still depend on heaven to survive," he says.
The conversation is about more than just water. It is about China's rural-urban divide. Several hundred million people may have become part of the new urban middle class, but roughly 800m still live in the countryside and have seen little benefit from the booming economy. I ask another villager, 44-year-old Wang Fuxian, if she feels forgotten. "Of course we do," she scoffs, squinting into the sun. "The city is still the city, and the countryside …" She doesn't finish her sentence.
***
The river turns north toward Mongolia, a sombre sheet of brown passing even more sombre towns. Wuhai, Shizuishan, Linhe, Wuyuan—towns no one in the west has heard of, but that are having a growing impact on the lives of everyone. They pump out smoke and smog into the atmosphere day and night. It then turns east, forming a huge arc, a barrier against the mighty Gobi desert that seeks to encroach from the north. Then, quite suddenly, after passing the huge industrial city of Baotou, the river turns 90 degrees south again and surges back toward the heartland of agricultural China. We are entering the "black triangle," where below the yellow soil lie jet black seams of coal. Roads are jammed with trucks hauling the precious cargo to the insatiable market beyond.
Now more than 100 metres wide, the Yellow river passes through a gorge several hundred miles long and begins to rumble toward the Hukou waterfall. The sound of the waterfall, and its position on the Mother River just above the sites of the cradle of Chinese civilisation, led composer Xian Xinghai to write the Yellow River Cantata in 1937, a paean to the people of China and an exhortation to resist the invading Japanese. It had its premiere a two-hour drive from the waterfall, at the communist base in Yan'an, the town established by Mao at the end of the Long March as the main base from which to launch the communist revolution.
Now a centre for government-promoted tourism, here Chinese can learn about the birth of the People's Republic. They are greeted on arrival by performers in peasant dress singing "The East is Red," and can visit the caves where Mao, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping ate, slept and planned the peasant revolution that achieved communist victory in 1949. I dress up in the uniform of the Red army, to have my photo taken outside the caves.
A huge statue of Mao stands next to those of former comrades, many of whom he would later turn on. Beside the statue, I ask a group of Chinese baby boomers what Mao would think of this "theme park." They say, "Yes, he would like it." I'm not sure I agree, though he might have stuck around for the beauty pageant recently held near his former cave.
"It's called Red Tourism," explains my 27-year-old tour guide, Han Ning. "It is happening at all the places where the Communist party went during their rise to power in the 1930s and 1940s."
"But Maoism, and Marxism, seem rather distant now," I suggest to her. "Do you really believe it any more?"
"We just learn about it in school," she says. "We don't actually believe it."
***
As the river enters its lower reaches, passing the capitals of ancient China, it is perhaps appropriate that an imperial-style project should be under construction. The old cities—Kaifeng, Luoyang, Zhengzhou and Xi'an—are rising again and contributing disastrously to the water emergency of the North China Plain. The Communist party believes it has a solution, the snappily named "South-to-North-Water-Diversion Project."
Zhang Tongli is in charge of the project in Henan province, and he meets me in his imperial-sized office in the regional capital of Zhengzhou. In his self-important manner, he rolls out some data. "It's the largest water project in the world with three different channels from the Yangtze river to northern China," he says. "The whole project will cost $60bn and will eventually transfer nearly 50 trillion litres of water per year from the Yangtze river some 500 kilometres south of here. It will not be finished for at least another 30 years."
The channels will not feed into the Yellow river but pass under it, continuing on to the parched regions north of it. Like the Great Wall or the Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze, it is an enormous project made possible by a strong and rich central government. But is it wise? And will it be built quickly enough? No one is allowed to ask these questions.
Urban China is largely oblivious to the water problem. Cities are growing economically at a rate of 10 per cent a year, and that means demand for water will grow too. Water was free in China until the 1980s and remains heavily subsidised; the party is wary of alienating the urban middle class by charging more for usage. So it lets the water flow for next to nothing when it should be charging in order to conserve it.
For now, villages in the river's shadow, freed from the danger of flooding, are suspended between the past and the future. Zhang Juwen, an 80-year-old former Yellow river boatman, sporting a navy blue "Mao" cap, says, "My house used to be right on the bank of the river." It has now receded to a channel running down the middle of an expansive dry river bed, several hundred metres away. Zhang, though, is in no doubt this is progress.
"It's great. The water's controlled. Now they just open the dam and let water out when they want it." He need no longer fear floods. And, as with so many stretches of the Yellow river, concerns about pollution and water shortage have been soothed by the government's insistence that everything is under control.
I take a train east along the river as it sweeps into the province of Shandong. It was here the river stopped dead in the 1990s, alerting the government to the water crisis it is now trying to address.
The Yellow river's journey ends with a whimper, as it crawls exhausted to the coast. At least the river does now reach the sea. But can the Mother River survive? It has always symbolised China's greatness, and now symbolises the country's dream of greatness again. Whether that greatness can fully be realised will depend on how the government handles the contradictions of development and preservation, reflected in the muddy waters of the Yellow river.
