IF GEOGRAPHY is destiny, then China’s path was always going to be a difficult one. With a landmass the size of the United States, 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 arguably most dangerous of its waterways, but it is the Yellow River that is known as the Mother River. Chinese civilisation emerged along the banks of the Yellow River thousands of years ago, 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 very different 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 lower reaches, between Hancheng and the sea, were often in flood, killing millions of people and threatening the emperor with the ensuing unrest. It comes as no surprise that almost exactly midway between its source and the coastal delta, eight huge red characters are painted on the downstream face of the Sanmenxia Dam – ‘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 inextricably linked to the ability to control the Yellow River.

 

 

Sanmenxia Dam is modern proof that the Yellow Rover has been tamed, perhaps too much so. Holding back the water has also held back silt, causing major problems upstream. But beyond the dam and its floodgates, the riverbanks now rarely give way like tofu. Man no lonnger 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 1990s, the river failed to reach the sea, dying to a halt in the eastern province of Shandong several hundred kilometres short of the sea.

     To travel along the Yellow River is therefore not just an ordinary journey of exploration. It is a journey into China's past and into its future, and a collision with the contradictioins of its current course of development that could threaten the country's rise to global dominance.

 

Perhaps the first thing you notice about the river's source, more than 2,500 kilometres to the west of Sanmenxia, is the silence that wraps itself around the sheer pristine beauty of the place. The river flows out of two large mountain lakes, stretched out below snow-capped mountains high on the Tibetan Plateau, two hours' drive from the provincial capital of Madoi. At more than 4,200 metres above sea level, the air is thin here, so it's not just the view that takes your breath away. I stand, drinking in the fresh air and the solitude. My driver, a Tibetan called Mr Zhou, stands at a distance beside his jeep, smoking.

     Beauty can be deceptive. At first, the blue sky and the mountain snow dazzle. Wolves, foxes, deer dart across the landscape, nervously eyeing the rare human visitor. An eagle circles overhead. Water from the lakes – bright and clear – bears no resemblance to the muddy flow downstream that gives the river its name. 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 – four thousand of them. But barely a thousand 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 forty per cent of its flow is supposed to originate 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 fragile soil that sustains an entire ecosystem is increasingly dry and barren. They say 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 factor, and has begun to force Tibetans to give up nomadic herding.

     On the outskirts of Madoi is a row of white cinder-block houses with red roofing 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 that tent for seventy-two 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. In response to the erosion of the land and its impact on the Yellow River, the government gave him the house, and an annual allowance, to quit herding. He is sad, but understands the necessity.

     ‘It’s very simple,’ says Danma, his nephew interpreting from his native Tibetan. ‘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.’

     Danma’s wife prepares cups of salted milky Tibetan tea for her family and their visitor, and I enjoy its warming effects after the bone-numbing winter cold outside. The son and nephew show me around their house, filled with colourful Tibetan fabrics and furniture, a small Buddhist shrine in the bedroom sharing space with a photograph of the exiled Dalai Lama.

     Danma’s nephew, Dorje Esai, is a study in contradictions brought on by the new way of life. 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.’

     ‘I have no idea what the future holds,’ he says. ‘We have no water, and no grass. In twenty years’ time, there won’t be many animals left, and there won’t be many nomads either.’

     In the street outside, a form of Tibetan pop music blasts from the speakers of 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 something out of 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 nineteenth century. China’s government says it is all in a good cause – saving the Yellow River – and locals have no argument about that; but it 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. Driver Zhou wants to take me to meet his family, who live beside the first dam built on the river at Longyangxia. His house is new, a picture of the Potala Palace in Lhasa on one wall, a picture of Chairman Mao on the other. His eighty-year-old mother sits on the bed, beaming a toothless smile. He hands cigarettes – still the currency of masculinity in rural China – to each of his brothers as they discuss their latest business deals. Although ethnically Tibetan, they speak to each other in Mandarin, and address each other by Chinese, not Tibetan, names. ‘Tibetan is not so convenient,’ Zhou explains. ‘None of the Chinese people know how to pronounce Tibetan names.’

 

The Yellow River runs clear blue near its source on the Tibetan Plateau.

In China, people say a dipperful of water from the Yellow River is seven-tenths mud. At the industrial city of Lanzhou, after the river has dropped down off the Tibetan Plateau, the water is more like seven-tenths toxic waste. Lanzhou has long been on the list of the top twenty most polluted cities in the world. The smog that blankets the city is horrendous. As the pure waters of the river emerge from the mountains to the southwest and flow towards Lanzhou, they have begun to absorb the yellow earth, or loess, from the increasingly barren land all around. For the first time the river takes on the yellow hue that it retains throughout its journey towards the Bohai Gulf. The landscape is transformed here, from the unspoiled green of the Tibetan Plateau to the arid, damaged, gasping land where nature has retreated, forced back by the onslaught of industrialisation.

     The river, though, is a focal point for one of Lanzhou’s few tourist attractions: hopping aboard a raft, made from a few slats of wood strapped across fifteen inflated pigskins, and riding the river. It is a surprisingly stable craft, and the boatman hops about at the back maintaining balance as the force of the river sweeps us downstream, singing 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 a strikingly strange aspect of travelling along the Yellow River – that it is almost entirely unnavigable. At any stretch of the Yangtze River to the south, one can hop a boat upstream or down, but heavy silting from the loess means the Yellow River is too shallow for almost any type of boat. From here until the delta, more than 2,500 kilometres to the east, the Mother River is useless for transportation.

     Pollution, however, is the immediate concern in Lanzhou and the city now sports several large round buildings, new water-treatment plants, which look like blue bubbles perched beside the river. Residents say the water is cleaner now than it was seven or eight years ago, due in some part at least to a new type of Chinese citizen: the environmental activist.

     Zhao Zhong is a tall twenty-five-year-old man whose gentle manner belies a steely commitment to environmental protection. Zhao came to college in Lanzhou, and became concerned about the levels of pollution there. He decided he wasn’t going to let the Yellow River die, and so he set up a non­governmental organisation, called Green Camel Bell, to try to deal with some of the most pressing environmental issues. Zhao says Green Camel Bell and other NGOs are filling a void left by the retreat of the Communist Party from people’s everyday 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 do, working within this new space.’

 

Smokestacks near Baiyin in Jingyuan County.

As we approach the town, a road sign urges us: ‘Create a Harmonious Baiyin, Increase the Speed of Development’. The sign sums up well the central contradiction at the heart of the Yellow River, and indeed the whole of China. Baiyin city officials are doing everything to increase the speed of development, but in doing so, they are not creating harmony. Indeed, they are creating the opposite. By hastening development, man and nature will inevitably clash. With more energy being devoted to cleaning up the environment in places like Lanzhou and other big cities, the situation there 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.

     From smelters and factories comes a dark, fetid outflow that drains into a number of small streams. The streams flow into a small tributary, which feeds directly into the Yellow River. Here, suspended in the filthy water amid the sounds and smells of the Industrial Revolution, are some of the biggest questions facing modern China: can it maintain high levels of economic growth without destroying the environment? And is the blowback from industrialisation – manifest in angry demonstrations and serious health problems around the country – starting to negate economic gains.

 

Zhao Zhong with schoolchildren south of Baiyin.

Zhao takes me through the back streets on the outskirts of the city, where factories cluster and multiply like cancer cells. Such is the diversity of industry, one could run through a chart of the chemical elements and find them all here – heavy metals of all sorts being purified and refined, the waste being spat back in the local water supply. Zhao works with NGOs in Beijing using a hand-held global positioning system to record the coordinates of each polluting factory, which he then posts on the Internet. Several factories have been forced to close as a result of his ‘name and shame’ approach.

     After our tour of Baiyin, Zhao drives with us south to a school where he occasionally teaches classes on environmental issues. He hands out some leaflets to a class of fifty eager ten-year-olds. ‘They are the future,’ he says, adding that it is his job to make them feel they have a stake in a cleaner China. Zhao’s commitment is admirable, and his enthusiasm infectious, but he is swimming against a very 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 at least is committed to cleaning up pollution. In practice, local governments are reluctant to close down polluting factories, however dirty, because of the jobs and prosperity they bring to the local area.

     China needs industry to create jobs, and the jobs create social stability, so it cannot stop industrial growth. The government’s legitimacy is almost entirely economic. So here is perhaps the biggest contradiction 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. And the forces that are strengthening China, and may lead it on to greatness, are the very same forces that are weakening China and threatening to tear the country apart.

     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 rendition of ‘Hotel California’ to a casual assemblage of Chinese businessmen. The ar­rival of Filipino bands in the lobby bars of hotels in western China is a strong 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.

     Exploring Yinchuan, a city of one million people on the east bank of the Yellow River, I find it to be more pleasant, and wealthy, than I had expected. In some ways, it feels like a carbon 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 much more like Central Asia. The landscape is different, too. This is desert country: to the west lies the Tengger Desert, to the north is the Gobi, which is swallowing huge swathes of grassland every year.

     With the river itself unnavigable, I trace its path by rail and road, duly impressed by the quality of freeways built to help open up remoter regions and slowly knitting the country together, as they flood the cities with migrants. But I keep an eye on the river, and am occasionally rewarded with a surprise: straddling the riverbank, a fifteen-metre waterwheel. The water is diverted into a little channel at the side of the river which drives the wheel, submerging the attached wooden boxes, which carry water up to the top, where it empties into a tank, along another channel and out into the gasping fields. But northern China needs more than waterwheels and you don’t have to travel far from the Yellow River to see evidence of a full-blown water emergency.

 

An old-fashioned waterwheel used to irrigate surrounding fields.

At the tiny village of Tie Zhu Quan, about seventy kilometres from the river, Zhang Guangjing flips a switch and pumps his harvest of rainwater from a nearby pond onto his fields. His is one of the few ponds left in the village still holding water. Others have already been pumped dry. 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 sixty-year-old farmer, and his neighbours in a walled courtyard in the village. The bright yellows of the recently harvested corn and bright blue Chinese sky drown out the drab greys, the browns and smudged greens of the flat, bleak, open countryside. The villagers have complaints – the bumpy unpaved road to their village, the cost of petrol and the price of fertiliser – but on one problem all agree. ‘Water,’ says Shao Zhong, who has spent all his sixty-seven 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 12,500 litres of water a year – less than one tenth the consumption of a single American. For drinking water, Shao says they rely on rainwater gathered in cisterns, and deeper and deeper wells that chase the falling levels of aquifers. For crops, there is only the rain. ‘We still depend on heaven to survive,’ he says. Another villager, a tall, thin woman called Li Guizhen adds, ‘If it doesn’t rain then we simply don’t have any harvest.’

     The conversation is more than just about water. It’s about the rural-urban divide, and the struggle to make ends meet in rural China. Several hundred million people may have become part of the new urban middle class, but 800 million still live in the countryside and have seen little benefit from the booming economy. I ask another villager, forty-four-year-old Wang Fuxian, if she feels forgotten. ‘Of course we do,’ she scoffs, squinting into the sun. It’s a common response, borne from a growing belief that lives and resources are being sacrificed for the sake of cities. ‘The wealth gap is still so noticeable,’ says Li Guizhen. ‘The city is still the city, and the countryside.…’ She doesn’t finish.

     Bumping by jeep over the dusty plain, we head back toward the river, the map in front of me telling its own a story of eternal water shortage, with local names such as Shout for Water Village and Welcome Water Bridge. A journey down the Yellow River feels a long way from the shiny optimism of Shanghai or Beijing. Inland, the cost of progress is all too clear.

     The river turns northward, a sombre sheet of brown passing even more som­bre towns. Wuhai, Shizuishan, Linhe, Wuyuan, towns no one in the West has ever heard of, but towns that are having a growing impact on the lives of everyone. They pump out smoke and smog into the atmosphere day and night. Beyond the towns, the river is like a barrier holding back the desert that wants to swallow up northern China, a last defence against the mighty Gobi as it arcs toward Mongolia. Then, quite suddenly, after passing the huge industrial city of Baotou, the river turns a sharp ninety degrees south and surges away from the edge of nomadic Mongolia 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 coal destined to feed the Chinese economic beast that never sleeps.

     Now more than a hundred metres wide, the Yellow River for the first time lets loose as it passes through a gorge for several hundred kilometres, 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 for them 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 Zedong 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 visit the caves where Mao and Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping ate, slept and planned the peasant revolution that ultimately swept Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang from the Mainland and achieved Communist victory in 1949. I can’t resist getting dressed up with the other tourists in the uniform of the Red Army, to have my photo taken outside the caves.

     A huge statue of Chairman Mao stands next to former comrades, many of whom he would later turn against and push to their deaths. The Communist Party has rewritten history here, just as it is now rewriting the economic fortunes of the region. Beside the statue, I ask a group of Chinese baby-boomers what Chairman Mao would think of this ‘theme park’. They say, ‘Yes, he would like it.’ I’m not sure he would, though he might have given a wink to the beauty pageant recently held near his former cave.

     ‘It’s called Red Tourism,’ explains my twenty-seven-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.’

     After an evening in Yan’an singing revolutionary karaoke (‘… the east is red, the sun rises, out of China comes Mao Zedong….’), I leave Yan’an in the back seat of a shiny new Buick saloon. It used to take ten hours to drive through the mountains from Yan’an to the regional capital Xi’an. Now it takes just three hours, along a smooth new highway that crosses, the driver tells me, the highest road bridge in Asia.

     ‘Drive a Civilised Car, Be a Civilised Person’ says the sign as we approach Xi’an, the original imperial capital, home to several dynasties and countless emperors, before it went into decline nearly a thousand years ago. If the word ‘Renaissance’ could be applied to any city anywhere in the world, it must be this one. The city buzzes with life. I take in all the major tourist sites – the terracotta army, the beautiful Chinese-style mosque, the various pagodas – then pay a visit to Xi’an’s first online gaming company. I take in a movie, make a stop at WalMart, dazzled by the choice on the shelves, eat sushi, and realise I could be in almost any city in Europe or North America.

 

Red Tourism at the Yellow River’s Hukou Waterfall.

 

‘Everyone used to want to move to Shanghai,’ says a twenty-something I meet at the online gaming company, ‘Now everyone wants to move here.’

     It is perhaps appropriate as the river enters its lower reaches, passing the ancient capitals of ancient China, that an imperial-style project should be under construction. The old cities – Kaifeng, Luoyang, Zhengzhou – are, like Xi’an, rising again, at an alarming speed. Their growth is contributing disastrously to the water emergency of the North China Plain. Aquifers are dropping by a metre a year in some places as industry and growth suck up underground reserves built up over millennia. 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 rather self-important manner, he rolls out some superlatives for me. ‘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 about sixty billion dollars and will eventually transfer nearly fifty trillion litres of water per year from the Yangtze River more than a 1,000 kilometres to the south of here. It will not be fully completed for at least another thirty years.’

     The channels will not feed into the Yellow River but pass under it, continuing on to the parched regions north of the river. By shipping water north, the reasoning goes, the strain of overuse on the Yellow River will be relieved. Like the Great Wall, or more recently the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze, it’s an enormous project made possible by a strong central government. But is it wise? And will it be built fast enough to make any difference?

     Urban China is largely oblivious to the water problem. Cities are growing, as is the whole of China, at a rate of ten per cent a year, and that means demand for water will grow too. Water was free in China until the 1980s, and is still heavily subsidised, and the Party is wary of alienating the urban middle class by charging for water usage. So it lets the water flow for next to nothing, when it should be pricing it for conservation.

     If you can take your mind off the water problems for a while though, the cities south of the Yellow River in Henan province are wonderful to explore, a treasure trove of history and fun. There is one of the best night food markets in the world at Kaifeng; then the exquisitely carved Longmen caves outside Luoyang; the kung-fu schools beside Shaolin Monastery, where thousands of students study in symmetry; the museum at Zhengzhou, bursting with history cast in clay and bronze, as the city explodes with glass and metal.

     For now, villages in the river’s shadow, freed from the danger of flooding, are suspended between the past and the future. Much remains unchanged, with old customs rooted in centuries of tradition. But migration is stretching the fabric of relationships as more and more people quit the land; construction is even changing the face of the village as new money returns to build new homes. Most of all, the river itself is changing. Zhang Juwen, an eighty­year-old former Yellow River boatman, sporting a navy blue “Mao” cap and a sparse grey goatee, says, ‘My house used to be right on the bank of the river.’ He must now walk several hundred metres to reach the river, which has receded to a channel running down the middle of an expansive dry river bed. 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 in 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.

     From Kaifeng and Zhengzhou and Luoyang, with their old walls and lingering whiff of ancient civilisation, I take a train east along the river, following it 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 Yangtze River to the south finishes its journey with a huge industrial and demographic crescendo as it sweeps into Shanghai. The Yellow River’s journey, by contrast, ends with a whimper, as it crawls exhausted to the coast, managing at least to reach the sea. But can that continue? 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 to some extent on how the government handles the contradictions of development and preservation, reflected in the muddy waters of the Yellow River. And the modern mandarins in Beijing know that hanging over their heads is still the old saying, inscribed on the Sanmenxia Dam – ‘Huang He an lan, Guo tai min an’ – ‘When the Yellow River is at peace, China is at peace’.